the non-constitutionalist has been able to claim his sanction.

This was the work of Marx, and it so completely changed the conception, the policy, and the organized movement of Socialism that it may be regarded as having brought forth a new movement altogether. Therefore I find Marx's fame and position, not in his theories and explanations (all of which are subject to the limitations of the thought, knowledge and politics of his time, and to his own errors, and none of these will survive the reconsideration of future times), but, as I have said, in the simple fact that he imparted to the workingclass movement and to Socialism a greatness and a majesty in the evolution of human society, and gave it a method which sustained hopes for a prolonged conflict. That is why the fate of Marx's theory of value or of economic determinism will have no effect upon the place he occupies amongst the leaders of mankind. That place is secured by something more abiding. His vision of things and his understanding of their meaning and tendency is in no way impaired by the explanations he gave of them, and it was his vision and understanding that he contributed to make a feebly vague aspiration a virile and a definite movement. He saw the truth with power, and that remains alive when explanations of it fail and only gather the dust of beliefs that have been outlived. Marx was greater and more abiding than Marxism. This he himself saw when he is said to have exclaimed one day, deafened by the squabbles of disciples and would-be disciples: Thank God, I am no Marxist." It is not Marxism that survives but Marx.

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THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

In consequence of Marx's labours, Socialism, as the higher form of economic social organization which is to supplant the individualistic disorganization of Capitalism, became firmly established as an intellectual creed and social conception, and it has controlled since then the political and social policy of the working-classes, in so far as they have been consciously organized, throughout the world. In Marx's time, old theories had to be fought, and he had to be in conflict with the remnants of the organizations of the earlier exponents of Socialism, especially the French idealists born of the French Revolution. In time, the battles died down and the influence of Marx remained predominant. In Germany the various sections united at Gotha in 1875, and the Social Democratic Party was formed; in France, where romantic programmes and policies have always allured the people, union was not reached till much later, in 1903, after the International Congress at Amsterdam had taken steps to secure unity, and the authority of Jaurès made that possible; in Italy, rent with anarchism and secession, a Social Democratic Party was finally established by Turati, a lawyer of Milan, in 1891; in Switzerland, the Party has been organized since 1888; in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria, parties have been formed and are of considerable influence in politics; in America, the Socialist Labour Party was founded in 1877. In 1864, at a meeting in St. Martin's Town Hall, London, the International was started. The pains of growth were pretty severe in some of these new movements. Discipline and co-operation are hard to impose upon men

with a glowing vision and a new faith. When a new order is germinating in the minds of men the weeds of anarchy and disintegration grow very quickly on the broken-up soil. So, dissent and disruption often followed creation. Parties were rent and disappeared, but came again. The International, which at its origin made Governments shake for fear, was itself disrupted by internal strife between those who would be more saintly than others. Bakunin had a gospel purer than Marx, and hence those who were to subdue the world had, as a preliminary to the greater undertaking, to fight a civil war to subdue themselves. So the International went down, not by the attacks of Governments from the outside, but from internal explosions. In 1872 its headquarters were moved to America, which was a politic way of burying it. But, in 1889, it was born again, and up till the war it steadily grew in numbers. To it were affiliated the working class movements of every nation in the world. But the war broke out. Fear, nationalist influences, the discipline of the State, the comparative suddenness of the outburst, divided the International into its national sections, and there was nothing for it but a period when nearly every Socialist Party in the warring nations ranged itself behind its Government, accepted Government explanations for the tragedy, and, under stress of invasion or the fear of invasion, or determined to ward off the terrible humiliation and political and economic consequences of defeat, set aside all other thoughts than that of military victory as a preliminary to any peace settlement. So completely had the war turned the thoughts and feelings of people from the interests of ordinary social evolution, and the

policy of organized labour from its international creeds, that even in neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland, Denmark and Holland, war divisions were apparent. War is a tragic interlude in the life of peoples, and that was never better seen than in the last one.

When the battles ended an International meeting was summoned to meet in February, 1920, at Berne, but it was apparent that war antagonisms not between nations, but between factions within nations, were not to be healed in a day. The Russian Bolshevist revolution had thrown discord into the midst of every national Socialist Party, and oppositions that had grown up during the war-as between the German Majority and Independents-were represented at Berne in order to range the whole International, if they could, on their side of their internal national quarrels. The British section alone presented some semblance of unity. Italy and Switzerland had become too enamoured of Russian methods and theories to attend. The Russian Bolshevists had summoned, before the Berne meeting, an International Congress at Moscow, which was to found the Third International, and declare for the Bolshevist policy. At first, a strong current towards Moscow flowed through the Socialist movement, but it presently began to subside, and though the French Party in 1920 went, by a majority and after a split, to Moscow, the current slackened and began to flow backwards. Meanwhile, owing to the objection of some sections to work with others which had a strong imperialist war record from which they had not purged themselves, and to the action of others, like the Belgians, in remaining inside Coalition Governments for reasons which

meant that they believed that Socialists should co-operate with bourgeois parties for purposes which were purely reformist, there was secession after secession from the Second International, and at the end of 1920, a Conference was held at Berne of such bodies and was later resumed at Vienna, and a committee was formed to watch the international situation, and re-form the Socialist International when opportunity presented itself. This book will be published before any further development can take place, and in the meanwhile there is nothing in existence that can be called a Socialist International. It will be born again with absolute certainty, however.

DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALIST PARTIES

But I have anticipated somewhat in order that I might without break deal with the International. A brief narration of the movement in this country will enable me to indicate what has happened since Marx's death in the development of Socialist conceptions and theories, dealing only with their broader features. Socialist critics, as I have told, forged from the Political Economy of their day the weapons which were to destroy that Economy, as an apology for the working of Capitalism, and, though lacking the commanding genius of Marx and failing to make big things appear big to the world, they did gather coteries together and arm them with sound arguments. These coteries published their pamphlets, did their parochial work and cherished their creeds. If the mass did not dance with them, it was partly because the music was strange to their ears. For generations, our