afraid to trust them entirely until it was known for certain that Cornwallis's surrender meant the end of hostilities. During the next few years the two parties contended on fairly equal terms. The Republicans were usually successful whenever the financial issue was emphasized, the Constitutionalists whenever it was possible to revive the prejudices of the war. By taking advantage of the general conservative movement which swept over practically all the states in 1786, the Republicans were able first to revise (1786) and then to repeal (1789) the test acts, to secure the ratification of the federal constitution and, finally, to draft a new constitution for the state itself (1790). As national political parties developed, the Constitutionalists became Jeffersonian Republicans and the Republicans became Federalists. Several years elapsed before the former were entirely reconciled to the new conditions. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and the Fries Rebellion of 1799 represented respectively the last efforts of the Scotch-Irish and the Germans to revive the old war-time methods. The natural growth of population in the West, however, in time restored the peaceful supremacy of the radicals, and the party of Jefferson and Jackson retained almost uninterrupted control of the state until 1860.

BRYN MAWR College.

W. ROY SMITH.

WE

MARXISM VERSUS SOCIALISM. III'

VI

E are told that with the general proletarization of the masses, with the concentration of capital and the numerical diminution of capitalist magnates, a parallel process takes place which makes the existing mode of production not only intolerable but untenable. It is the progressive impoverishment, the rapidly increasing misery, the economic sinking and physical degeneration of the proletariat which make a social revolution mandatory upon suffering humanity under pain of starvation. In the words of the Communist Manifesto: The modern laborer, . . . instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule, because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society."

This doctrine of increasing misery, which was later elaborated by Marx in his Capital, is based upon observations and facts of his time. These facts Marx interpreted theoretically in a brilliant way.

Behind this doctrine of increasing misery was an original theory of wages. It was not the "iron law" of wages, as some recent writers claim.3 There is nothing specifically socialistic

1 For earlier parts of this study see POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, XXIII (June, 1908), 193–219, (December, 1908), 652–689.

2 Communist Manifesto, p. 31.

So, for instance, Rossignol, Orthodox Socialism, pp. 9, 26, and W. H. Mallock, Socialism (The National Civic Federation, New York, n. d.), p. 10.

about the iron law of wages. It is Ricardo's theory, to which Lassalle added the adjective iron, and which Marx for many excellent reasons contemptuously rejected. The iron law of wages, while an effective weapon in the hands of so great an agitator as Lassalle, gave as such no reasonable assurance that the end of the wage system was near. A generation ago wages represented the laborer's cost of living; a generation from now wages would, according to the iron law, still represent the laborer's cost of living. There is no reason to assume that the wage-earners of the future will necessarily oppose the wage system any more than the laborers of the past have opposed it. On the other hand, a doctrine that asserts as inevitable a progressively increasing misery of the working class gives reasonable assurance that the wage-earners will increasingly and progressively oppose the existing economic system.

Furthermore, the industrial revolution was followed by an era of progressive diminution of wages. Wages were obviously sinking rapidly, not only below the demands of the standard of living but actually in many instances below the possible requirements of physical existence. Was this phenomenon taken into account by the Ricardian doctrine? In 1835 the Governor-General of India reported: "The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India."

of Europe's weavers was not much better. stance, the following official figures, quoted Schulze-Gaevernitz:

And the situation Consider, for inby Professor von

1 Marx wrote to Bracke in 1875: "Von dem ehernen Lohngesetz' gehört Lassalle bekanntlich nichts als das den Goetheschen 'ewigen, ehernen, grossen Gesetzen' entlehnte Wort, 'ehern.' Das Wort 'chern' ist eine Signative, woran sich die Rechtgläubigen erkennen. Nehme ich aber das Gesetz mit Lassalle's Stempel und daher in seinem Sinn, so muss ich es auch mit seiner Begründung nehmen. Und was ist sie! Wie Lange schon kurz nach Lassalle's Tod zeigte: die (von Lange selbst gepredigte) Malthus'sche Bevölkerungstheorie. Ist dies aber richtig, so kann ich wieder das Gesetz nicht aufheben und wenn ich hundertmal die Lohnarbeit aufhebe, weil das Gesetz dann nicht nur das System der Lohnarbeit sondern jedes gesellschaftliche System beherrscht. Gerade hierauf fussend, haben seit fünfzig Jahren und länger die Oekonomisten bewiesen, das der Sozialismus das Naturbegründete nicht aufheben sondern nur verallgemeinern, gleichzeitig über die Oberfläche der Gesellschaft verteilen könne." Neue Zeit, Jahrgang IX (1891), vol. 1, P. 570.

On an average good weavers in Bolton earned weekly:

The stuff in question was at the time not yet produced by the powerloom. It permitted, therefore, the chance of far more favorable remuneration than the production, for example of printing calico. There were even wages as low as 2s. to 3s. weekly.'

The Silesian weavers were even worse off, they were actually dying of starvation. All this misery was, from the point of view of our economic classics, a situation for which nature alone was to blame.3

The growth of pauperism, the degradation and degeneration of the laboring class in the first half of the nineteenth century were not invented by socialist agitators. The facts were so tangible that the most conservative economists of the time. were the most emphatic in their condemnation of existing conditions and the first to demand checks and restrictions of the capitalist régime. The writings of the leading French and German economists and the speeches of Lord Ashley contain statements as drastic as any to be found in the socialist literature. The Communist Manifesto contains an attack upon the family-an attack which, we believe, Marx himself in later years regretted. There we read:

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. . . . The bourgeois clap-trap

1 Schulze-Gaevernitz, The Cotton Trade in England and on the Continent (London, 1895), p. 31.

J. W. Wolff in Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1845, pp. 174-202.

3 "A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At Nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders." Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (2d ed., 1803), p. 531.

about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child become all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.1

But no less respectable and conservative a scholar than Robert von Mohl was lamenting as early as 1835, that the working-man's wife and children were confiscated by the factory system, and that family life was utterly destroyed among the industrial proletariat. Nor was the accusation wholly unwarranted that the industrial system was demoralizing the wives and daughters of laboring men. It was rather a common observation that the women, who to so large an extent were replacing skilled male laborers, were thrown at each industrial crisis on the streets as prostitutes. We have, for instance, the following statement from the chief constable of Bolton, Mr. Harris:

Unfortunate females who, in consequence of the cotton famine, were at its commencement thrown out of employment, have thereby become outcasts of society; and now though trade has revived and work is plentiful they continue members of that unfortunate class and are likely to continue so. There are also in the borough more youthful prostitutes than I have known for the last twenty-five years.3

Yet, while acknowledging the unspeakable misery of the working class, our classical political economy had no word of solace and no ray of hope for the toilers. Even as late as 1874 one of the last true-blue representatives of classical political economy, Mr. Cairnes, had the admirable courage to state frankly and precisely his attitude. The possibility of any improvement of the living conditions of the industrial laborers

1 Communist Manifesto, pp. 39, 40.

“Über die Nachteile, welche sowohl den Arbeitern selbst als dem Wohlstande und der Sicherheit der gesammten bürgerlichen Gesellschaft von dem fabrikmässigen Betriebe der Industrie zugehen, und über die Notwendigkeit gründlicher Vorbeugungsmittel," in K. H. Rau's Archiv der politischen Oekonomie und Polizeiwissenschaft (Heidelberg, 1835), vol. ii, pp. 145, 146, 148, 151, 156.

Reports of the Inspectors of Factories for the half year ending October 31, 1865. London, 1866, Parliamentary Papers, Session 1 February-10 August, 1866, vol. χχίν.