while the lesser industries are to be left free to develop as they will.

The practical consequences of this attitude are as noteworthy for this party as they are for society in general. Socialist writers before audiences and in their printed appeals will still protest solemnly and indignantly that these changes are free from inconsistencies and of slight significance. My reply to this is that the man who made these qualifications and obvious compromises a dozen years ago, was in every continental country pronounced a renegade. Long after English Fabians had settled to the humbler tasks of political and industrial opportunism, it was common to hear continental socialists speak of the Fabians as a group of bourgeois imitators that would only bring disgrace upon the cause by betraying its fundamental principles. When the Belgian coöperatives began to develop so far as to hold the collectivist politics in some restraint, many of the brotherhood in France classed them contemptuously with the Fabians, as mere reformers."

Those who believed in a flawless economic dogma, and in revolutionary and heroic remedies, were right to count these reformers as enemies. From the moment the ways of practical compromise were opened, every step has led to affiliation with the ordinary methods of social improvement. The full force and significance of this show at once in the practical growth of the coöperative. In the country it must have capital and therefore a system of saving. The pest of the Jewish usurer is the first obstacle to One weapon against the usurer has proved so effective that no practical man can ignore it - the

overcome.

Raiffeisen Bank or some form of Mutual Credit Association. Instead of the usurer's twelve to fifteen per cent, four and five per cent, on better and easier terms, may be secured. Therefore the collectivists adopt these agencies, the very purpose of which is to widen and strengthen private property in the very forms that socialism has pronounced parasitic. In the last statement I have received, which records the works. and purposes of the party, the socialists are urged to make all possible use of Raiffeisen credit banks. There is even praise of the catholic Abbé Mellaerts who introduced them into Belgium. These banks, says the socialist deputé from Liège, "rendent de réels services" "don't go to the great banks, but save your own money. Lend and borrow for four per cent, and win for yourselves economic independence." 1

1 The contrast between the sobriety of the Belgian socialism that has had fifteen years' business experience and the socialism in the neighboring French towns is full of lessons.

The red flag is a sacred symbol, and one of the most popular gayeties is to insult the national emblem- le drapeau tricolore.

Citizen Dormoy is applauded when he points to the national flag at the Congress at Montluçon and says, "Sous les plis duquel le bourgeois a commis toutes les trahisons envers la patrie."

This is the grim and bitter emphasis which is still put upon the determined apartness of the class struggle. One form which this tenacious illusion takes is the uproarious approval of the "universal strike." At every congress since that at Calais, 1890, to that at Rennes, in 1898, this tumultuous resolution is passed, "Let the world's workers lay down their tools; let the millions in every land who produce the wealth stop all toil, and the infamous parasite of capital will soon capitulate." Some talk like this is still tolerated among the Belgian collectivists, but the comrades who guide the movement have learned that it is nonsense. They have come to know first, that the workers will not unite in any such insane escapade, and second, that if they did, it would work chiefly to their own undoing.

For dramatic interest there is even a more startling recommendation. If the great Lassalle had one enemy upon whom he poured more scorn than upon any other, that man was Schultze-Delitzsch. All that was scathing and venomous in the German tongue was showered upon this founder of credit banks for town populations. They were to serve the small needs in the town as Reiffeisen met them in the country. What would this high priest of socialism have said, to find in authoritative socialist sources, a single generation after his death, a cordial recommendation of Schultze-Delitzsch's banking scheme? To Lassalle, every use that the workingman made of these credit banks "added a link to the chain that bound him." The very gospel of "self-help" for which Schultze stood is now advocated simply and directly in the catechisms for popular socialist instruction. (Almanach des Cooperateurs Belges, 1900.) The truth is that the cooperatives have done their work so well that the members see the necessity of saving, borrowing, lending, even if in forms that violate every theoretic principle of socialism. They have learned that the very principle of association, on which their whole structure must be built, gets its strength through the encouragement of private ownership, not only of "property for consumption " which the theory allows, but of property that creates personal rent and profits. Precisely that has come about which the old guard of revolutionaries predicted: "Once begin to compromise," they said, "with the reform which city, state, or bourgeois has sanctioned, and we are lost. Our glory and our strength is in fighting the existing order, not in preserving and improving it." Whether

for loss or gain, the irrevocable step has been taken. The party is once for all committed to the slower and humbler ways of industrial and political reforms sanctioned by an experience far wider than that which any socialist party can claim.

All that is best in socialism will gain by this change. It need abate no jot or tittle of its purpose to win for society every increment of gain that proves to be "unearned." The transformation that we have followed now forces it, however, to use means and methods that are educational; that furnish, as they are applied, their own tests of success or failure; that tend steadily to unite men as friends, and not to divide them as enemies.1

1 The very essence of "self-help" as applied to the work of these coöperatives is seen in the following question and answer in a catechism of 1899.

D.—Que peuvent donc faire les travailleurs?

R. Profiter de leurs moments de loisir pour s'instruire, apprendre à se diriger eux-mêmes au lieu de remettre le soin à d'autres d'agir pour eux, et enfin tâcher de comprendre et d'utiliser la force qui réside dans la Coopération, p. 17.

CHAPTER XII

NEXT STEPS

THESE changes of temper, of method, and of purpose open to society every chance that could be asked for the industrial and social renovation that in some way must come. The real peril which we now face is the threat of a class conflict. If capitalism insists upon the policy of outraging the saving aspiration of the American workman to raise his standard of comfort and of leisure, every element of class conflict will strengthen among us. When a despatch is sent to a Southern state, asking for a car-load of negroes to break a strike, we see in concrete form what this use of subject and lower races may mean. Every added cable, wire, ship, and railway which destroy space, make it easier for capital to turn the lower labor standard against the higher. The coming of these cheaper immigrants will be a help, if they are not used to break the power of the unions. Labor organization, in spite of every unhappy fault that can be laid to its charge, stands for the higher standard of living. To break it means longer hours, lower wages, and a bitterer competition among the workers.

A New York builder, angered by delays upon his structure, tells me: "If it were not for the union, I could finish it in two-thirds of the time. I could get