We have come to a point now where professorial socialism and Christian socialism meet. Professors of political economy, finding themselves forced to abandon every hope of reconciling adverse interests of society without a moral and religious regeneration of the various social classes, turn to Christianity, and appeal to it for co-operation in their endeavors to bring about an era of peace and harmony. Professorial socialism terminates in Christianity. Christian socialism seeks in it a starting-point. De Lamennais, who was born in 1782, was one of the earliest representatives of Christian socialism. He was for a time a French Catholic priest and an ardent defender of the faith. He sought to bring about an alliance between the masses and the Church, in opposition to kings, whom he regarded as oppressors of the people. The Church was to become an organizing power, and was to gather the individuals, the atoms, of industrial society, into a compact and harmonious whole. She was to become the soul, the animating spirit, of the economic as well as the religious world. He hoped to see her found a grand co-operative association of laborers, which should free them from the yoke of capitalist and the tyranny of landlord. The democratic views entertained by Lamennais,[246] and his opposition to the monarchs of Europe, did not give satisfaction among the Church authorities. He went to Rome to plead his cause before Leo XII., and was received with open arms. But afterwards the motto of his journal L’Avenir, “Séparez vous des rois, tendez la main au peuple”—“separate yourselves from the kings, extend your hand to the people”—displeased Gregory XVI., and Lamennais, unable to win over the Pope to his views, finally left the Church in despair. “Catholicism was my own life,” said he, “because it is the life of humanity. I wished to defend it and draw it from the abyss into which it sinks more and more daily. Nothing was easier. The bishops have found that it would not suit them. Thus Rome lagged behind. I went there and saw the most abominable cloaque which ever offended human eyesight.... No other God rules there but egotism. For a piece of land, for a few piasters, they would bargain away the nations, the whole human race, even the blessed Trinity.”[205]
He wrote, after his return, “Les Paroles d’un Croyant”—“The Words of a Believer”—published in 1833, and perhaps his most celebrated work. It is a strange, weird, fascinating book. In prose, yet with all the fervor, imagery, and beauty of poetry, he describes the wrongs and sufferings inflicted on the laborer by rulers and capitalists. How is it, one might ask, that he, so far above the masses, can depict their sorrows as vividly as if he had felt them? It is precisely because he is not far above the toiling many; he has in sympathy drawn near to them; he feels with[247] and for them; what they have experienced, that has he also lived. Their pain is his pain; their anguish is his anguish, and has penetrated perhaps more deeply into his soul than into theirs.
In the following passage from “Les Paroles d’un Croyant” he shows how much worse are modern employers who oppress their laborers than were the earlier slave-owners. The story he tells is this:
“Now, there was a wicked and accursed man. And this man was strong and hated toil, so that he said to himself: ‘What shall I do? If I work not I shall die, and labor is to me intolerable.’
“Then there entered into his heart a thought born in hell. He went in the night and seized certain of his brethren while they slept, and bound them with chains.
“‘For,’ said he, ‘I will force them with whips and scourges to toil for me, and I will eat the fruit of their labor.’
“And he did that which he had resolved; and others, seeing it, did likewise, and the men of the earth were no longer brothers, but only masters and slaves.
“This was a day of sadness and mourning over all the face of the earth.
“A long time afterwards there arose another man, whose cruelty and wickedness exceeded the cruelty and wickedness of the first man.
“Seeing that men multiplied everywhere, and that the multitude of them was innumerable, he said to himself:
“‘I could indeed enchain some of these, and force them to work for me; but it would then be necessary to feed and otherwise maintain them, and that would diminish my gains. I will do better: I will let them[248] work for nothing; they will die, in truth, but their number is great; I will amass a fortune before their number is largely diminished, and there will always remain enough of them.’
“‘Now all this multitude of men might live on what they received in exchange for their labor.’
“Having thus spoken, he addressed himself separately to some of them, and said: ‘You work six hours, and you receive a piece of money for your labor; work twelve hours and you will receive two pieces of money, and you and your wives and your little ones will live better.’
“And they believed him.
“Then he said to them, ‘You work only half the days of the year; work every day in the year and your gains will be doubled.’
“And they believed him still.
“Now it happened that the quantity of labor having been doubled without any increase in the demand therefor, the half of those who previously lived by their labor could find no one to employ them.
“Then the wicked man whom they had believed said to them: ‘I will give labor to all, under condition that you will labor the same length of time, and that I shall pay you only half so much as I have been in the habit of doing; because I indeed desire to render you a service, but I do not wish to ruin myself.’
“And as they, their wives, and little ones were suffering the pangs of hunger, they accepted the proposal of the wicked man, and they blessed him; for, said they, ‘He gives us our life.’
“And, continuing to deceive them in the same manner, the wicked man ever increased their labor and ever diminished their wages.
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“And they died for lack of the necessaries of life, and others pressed forward to take their places; for poverty had become so terrible in the land, that entire families sold themselves for a morsel of bread.
“And the wicked, cruel man, who had lied to his brothers, amassed a larger fortune than the wicked man who had enslaved them.
“The name of the latter is tyrant; but the former has no name save in hell itself.”[206]
The Christian socialism of England has peculiarities which render it exceedingly interesting in connection with an account of French and German Christian socialism, furnishing, as it does, opportunities for instructive comparisons.
It arose about thirty years ago. Its founders were men like Charles Kingsley, Frederick Maurice, and Thomas Hughes. They were filled with horror at the wrongs and hardships of the lower classes, and rejected with lofty moral indignation the theory of the Manchester men that state and society were to do nothing about it. They refused to believe that the action of self-interest led to the most perfect social harmony, or that government should do nothing to alleviate suffering and elevate the masses. Some of their expressions might have satisfied even a social democrat. Kingsley expressed his opinion of economic liberalism by describing the Cobden and Bright scheme of the universe as the worst of all narrow, hypocritical, anarchic, and atheistic social philosophies; while he predicted the coming of good times to the poor, and the overthrow of mammonism, in these words: “Not by wrath and haste, but by patience[250] made perfect through suffering, canst thou proclaim this good news to the groaning masses, and deliver them, as thy Master did before thee, by the cross and not the sword. Divine paradox! Folly to the rich and mighty—the watchword to the weak, in whose weakness is God’s strength made perfect. ‘In your patience possess ye your souls, for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.’ Yes, he came then, and the Babel-tyranny of Rome fell, even as the more fearful, the more subtle, and more diabolic tyranny of mammon shall fall ere long—suicidal, even now crumbling by its innate decay. Yes; Babylon the Great—the commercial world of selfish competition, drunken with the blood of God’s people, whose merchandise is the bodies and souls of men—her doom is gone forth. And then—then—when they, the tyrants of the earth, who lived delicately with her, rejoicing in her sins, the plutocrats and bureaucrats, the money-changers and devourers of labor, are crying to the rocks to hide them, and to the hills to cover them, from the wrath of him that sitteth on the throne; then labor shall be free at last, and the poor shall eat and be satisfied, with things that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, but which God has prepared for those who love him.”[207]
Kingsley and his confrères held that modern competition was only one kind of warfare, and consequently sinful. They sought to replace it by co-operation, in which they found a practical carrying-out of Christian principles. Mr. Ludlow, Maurice, and others talked the matter over, and finally formed a society in[251] London to promote co-operative undertakings and the education of the lower classes. They assisted laborers to found productive co-operative associations. They established also a newspaper, the Christian Socialist, in which they made propaganda for their faith. They thought they had discovered the panacea for all social evils: “I certainly thought,” said Mr. Hughes afterwards—“and, for that matter, have never altered my opinion to this day—that here we had found the solution of the great labor question; but I was also convinced that we had nothing to do but just to announce it, and found an association or two, in order to convert all England, and usher in the millennium at once, so plain did the whole thing seem to me. I will not undertake to answer for the rest of the council, but I doubt whether I was at all more sanguine than the majority.”[208]
The Christian socialists established seventeen co-operative societies in London and twenty-four in other parts of England, but chiefly, if not wholly, in the south, before their organ ceased to appear. These, however, all failed. But about this time there began to spring up in the north of England distributive co-operative societies, not designed to produce commodities, but, as their name implies, to distribute them by establishing stores. These associations, which have prospered greatly, furnished an opportunity for some of the Christian socialists to exert themselves in behalf of the laborer. So far as there is to-day any active Christian socialism in England, it is to be found in the Co-operative union. Indeed, Mr. Thomas Hughes seems to identify the two movements in a[252] letter,[209] which he was kind enough to write me about Christian socialism. As it is interesting, and Americans are always glad to hear what the author of “Tom Brown at Rugby” has to say, I will take the liberty of quoting such parts of his letter as bear on our subject:
“The details of the Christian socialist movement may still be gathered from The Christian Socialist newspaper, and tracts, The Journal of Association, its short-lived successor, and Politics for the People, its more short-lived predecessor.... The leaders are quite scattered—Maurice, Kingsley, and Mansfield dead; Lord Ripon, Governor-general of India; Ludlow, Registrar of Friendly Societies; Ellison, a metropolitan magistrate; I a county-court judge. The only one left actively in this movement (which I have left only two months since) is E. Vansittart Neale, who is general secretary (and backbone and conscience) of the Co-operative union. I was chairman of the southern section till I took this judgeship.
“We have managed to keep this great organization, now consisting of some thousand societies, with some millions of capital, up to the principles of the Christian socialists—nominally, at any rate—and I really think the old spirit is, at any rate, alive in a large proportion of the rising leaders, though the mammon devil is, I am bound to own, vigorous among them, and hard to put down.... I still look to this movement as the best hope for England and other lands.”
Mr. Neale has been good enough to write me a fuller account of the connection between co-operation and Christian socialism, which he regards as two distinct movements—in their origin, at least. I will quote what he has to say about them:
“Manchester, December 4, 1882.
...
“I think that the Christian social efforts of Messrs. Maurice, Kingsley, Hughes, etc., and the co-operative movement out of which our present union has grown up, ought to be distinguished as really separate actions, independent of each other in their origin, though they have subsequently, to a certain extent, coalesced.
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“The distributive societies have grown up since 1844, principally from the impulse originating in the Rochdale Pioneers, which was, so far as it can be said to embody any moral principle, Owenite rather than Christian. No doubt it included, from the first, members of the various religious bodies which exist in England, and it never professed to substitute any other religious teaching for that given in the name of Christianity, as R. Owen’s followers had done. Therefore, among the disciples, men soon appeared who said, This co-operation which you advocate is nothing else than the practical application of Christianity to the ordinary business of life. Likewise, when, at a later date, those who had gathered around Mr. Maurice’s endeavors to show systematically the connection of Christian ideas with the Co-operative union, as is done by Mr. Hughes and myself in the ‘Manual for Co-operation,’ ... this application was accepted by the Congress of the Co-operative union as a legitimate descent of co-operation, and is more or less assented to at the present time by co-operators who never were in any way connected with Mr. Maurice.
“But this has been, as I have said, a result of relations which have grown up between two movements, distinct in their origin, but similar in their tendencies, and from this similarity, and the aid afforded by each to the other, naturally disposed to coalesce.
“In their origin the stores were antecedent to the teachings of the Christian socialists, which did not begin in any definite shape until 1849 and 1850, when the Rochdale Pioneers had got over the difficulties of their beginnings, and were doing a business of ￡6611 8s. 9d. in 1844 and ￡13,179 17s. in 1850; and other stores were beginning to spring up and attain considerable proportions in various towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, under the influence of the success of Rochdale. In London we had scarcely any knowledge of these societies till the end of 1850; and our efforts took principally the direction of attempts to form productive associations of workers by means of advances of capital to them on loan at four per cent. ............