The resultant multiplicity of ideas has been an excellent thing for the movement, for it has given to Socialism an unlimited variety of interpretations and tactics to choose from and test; it has made alliances between one or another aspect of Socialist thought and almost every science, every art, every branch of human activity; and it has ensured the freedom of Socialism as a whole from subservience to any one thinker.

From the multitude of ideas embodied in Socialist history, literature, and practical tactics, emerge only two or three that are essential. The most important idea is the Class Struggle.

Throughout history economic classes have fought with each other by force of arms and force of mind for mastery of the world or share in the mastery of the world. All the wars of history are of two kinds: (a) contests between members of the same class and their followers, between duke and duke, king and king, state and state, government and government; and (b) contests between classes within the same state, territory, or jurisdiction. The second type of war is known as a revolution if the revolting class succeeds; it is a "rebellion" if the revolting class fails. Revolution may be implicated in wars of the first type, may cause

them or grow out of them. But revolution always has a special object, the oversetting of one economic class by another. The triumphant class may be apparently larger or smaller than the vanquished. When imperial Rome succeeded republican Rome there was a shift of power from a more numerous to a less numerous master class. When the barons beat King John into subjection there was a shift of power from a less numerous to a more numerous master class. The Cromwellian war was the attempt of the country squire and farmer to wrest power from the aristocratic landlord and his allies, the city merchant and the monarchy. Its immediate result was the substitution of a new dynasty for the old. Its revolutionary result was realized later, in 1689, when with the Declaration of Rights the modern Parliament, representing all the owning and business classes, was more or less definitely established.

The French Revolution is a bewildering tangle of interstate and interclass conflicts. The middle class (the Third Estate) forced the king, the clergy, and the nobility to yield some of their privileges and set up an insecure republicanism. In this they were helped by the peasants and the mob. (In history, including the contem

poraneous history recorded in to-day's newspaper, “mob” almost always means working people.) The middle-class parties fought it out, leading the mob to revolution within revolution. Directory followed Committee of Public Safety; every provisional government was striking its rivals with one hand and conducting foreign wars with the other hand; until finally Napoleon with the army behind him swept republicanism out of the council chambers and established a military dictatorship. After his fall the middle classes, which he had the wit to foster and make use of, were the dominant power. The peasants merely changed masters; the middle-class business landlord succeeded the feudal landlord. And the city workers had found a master stronger than king or emperor; for meanwhile a greater revolution than any suggested by the name of Robespierre or Napoleon had taken place. Invention and commerce had brought the industrial era of the nineteenth century.

Recall another revolution which is nearer to us, the American Revolution. American merchants, landowners, and other patriots felt that they could do business better without the inter-) ference of the British Government. So they

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led the tax-ridden and mismanaged colonies against their British owners. The revolt of a dependent territory is rather like an international war than a civil war and shows fewer of the motives of a class war. This is true of the successful American Revolution, of the unsuccessful rebellion of the Southern Confederacy, of most insurrections of subject states against imperial states; class interests ✓ present but they are merged in the national interests. In the American Revolution it was the landlord and trading classes who were most interested in flinging off the British yoke. The condition of the non-owning classes in America was little changed. They lived as before, working, paying taxes and rent. The state governments remained. For four years after the war there was no organized national government. Then the national government was formed by a committee of the well-to-do; the mass of the people took little interest in it and had little to say about it. The founders of our republic contrived a modified form of the British Government, and it has been working badly ever since.

For the moment, however, we are not judging the value of governments, certainly not attempting to write their intricate history. We

wish simply to remind ourselves that there have been wars between states and within states in which the contestants belonged to the same economic class-king, duke, lawyer, merchant, artisan, laborer of one country or province pitted against king, duke, lawyer, merchant, artisan, laborer, of another country or province. The greatest of such wars blackens the earth to-day. There have also been wars in which dissimilar, unequal classes fought with each other for dominion of the soil on which they both stood.

The two kinds of war often go together; the demarcations of the nations involved or of the classes involved are not always sharp. But the two types of war are clearly discernible in history. It is invariably true that whenever a nation changes radically its form of government, not its size, its several statutes, its personalities, but its essential form, what has happened is that an economic revolution has taken place; a class, defined by its relations to property, has won a dominant or partial control of national affairs such as it has not hitherto enjoyed. The most deep-reaching revolution that the world has ever known occupied more than a hundred years and made itself felt in every corner of the