larger businesses based on franchises passed into the hands of the city. "When the whole business of managing the things that touch us to the quickgas, electric lights, water, street cars, etc. has to be

done at the City Hall," then, urge the socialists, "every imperfection and dishonesty will so strike at the pockets of the citizens, that they must perforce see to it that able and honest men alone are intrusted with city affairs."

I have heard this opinion from a German mayor in a town that owned meat markets, gas, telephone, water, and street service, "The citizens cannot help attending to their political duties, because bad management would cost them too much and subject them to such inconvenience."

It is considerations of this character, together with the broadening experience of European cities, that make it impossible to shirk the ordeal of thorough comparative tests. It is to these tests that we must henceforth trust rather than to any à priori pretence of speculation as to what the city and state can do or cannot do. No trial of these different administrative experiments could be fairly made until within very recent years. Both trade unionism and socialism had to pass through stages of the severest discipline and experience before any adequate comparison between socialistic and private-profit methods were possible.

These changes have now come. It is my contention that they offer to us, as a people, a perfectly fair chance, (a) to use the stupendous force at work. through the aggregations of labor in ways that shall make these bodies more and more conservative of every social value consistent with a growing democ

racy, and (b) to prepare ourselves for an oncoming socialism, so that it, too, shall become an aid rather than a hindrance to a more decent human society.

As socialism has been commonly conceived, I do not believe it brings an answer to a single one of our deepest life questions, but on the outposts of its development it is undergoing extraordinary transformations which we shall see at their best in France.

CHAPTER IX

SOCIALISM IN THE MAKING

EXCEPT for many unhappy experiments of Utopian character, socialism until recent years has shown no trace of positive and constructive workmanship. It has been the critic of the existing industrial order. If it had rendered no other service, this activity of relentless censorship would justify it. Much of the best social legislation on the continent of Europe is traceable directly to social agitation. Bismarck was blamed for making the admission, "If there were no social democracy, and if many were not afraid of it, even the moderate progress which we have hitherto made in social reform would not have been brought about." The greater part of socialist energies is still critical, and in this sense negative. The days of the mere fault-finder are, however, numbered. This change marks an epoch in the history of the movement. So long as it played the part of caviller, it took no responsibilities, nor could its pretensions be tested.

Within the brief period of five or six years it has become possible to apply a new and far more searching criticism to socialism. So long as it was a mere dream, so long as men felt it only as a hope, so long as it remained in the realm of theory and speculation, the only weapons that could be turned against it

were as unsubstantial as any that socialists themselves used. The patronizing strictures of the practical man were as airy and doctrinaire as any claims put forth by Marx, Jules Guesde, or William Morris. A library of books and pamphlets has been written to show the limits of human nature, the limits of corporate capacity, the limits of what the city or the state may legitimately undertake. Time and events have not dealt kindly with these opinions. Corporations now perform hundreds of services that earlier writers thought altogether beyond their scope. States and cities organize and carry on enterprises so various that the older theories, "what the state can do and what it cannot do," are very queer reading.

As long as social innovators were making fancy sketches of a perfect society, criticism was scarcely less fanciful. When the dream period passes into experiment, the possibilities of critical observation. first appear. A stage of socialistic development has now been reached, concerning which one may form as distinct a judgment as upon the results of the weather bureau or the sloyd system of education. Socialism now enters upon the formidable task of social reconstruction. One may roughly mark four stages in its growth. It was long Utopian, then under Lassalle's guidance it became political, passing thence into state and municipal activities that are strictly socialistic. This third stage is strangely enough nowhere the work of socialists, but of tories, political liberals, or military governments. Its final form is to unite politics with coöperative business, as in Belgian cities.

At the point where socialism begins to show itself

a force to reckon with in politics, its positive influence begins. We can measure it by the compromises and concessions wrung from the party in power. The years immediately following the Franco-Prussian war mark the rise of its political influence in Germany. The law of 1884, which permits the trade unions to unite, marks it in France. In Belgium its extraordinary career had an even later beginning. Socialists now sit upon the councils of more than a hundred towns in France, and many of the communes are politically controlled by socialists, subject to the veto of the prefect. This veto represents the grip which an extremely centralized government has upon local administration. Although the suffrage is practically as free as in the United States, the limits are very narrow within which a town council can introduce a change of policy. I have tried in many cities to see what socialistic steps have actually been taken. With two socialists in the government and nearly a million votes, actual performance is singularly lacking. Here one finds a drug store taken by the city, "to be run not for the enrichment of the petit bourgeois, but for all the inhabitants." There it is the city printing, the elimination of the private contractor, or a pawnshop in exact imitation of those long existing in most of the French towns. Again, the city is bread maker or the supplier of milk.

Grenoble owns a restaurant which furnishes daily more than twelve hundred meals. The city owns the land and the nine buildings upon it. That the competition may not be unfair against private eating-houses, rent is paid to the city, but the element of profit to any individual is eliminated. If at the

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