The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1907. SOCIALISM

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 31, Issue 44, 31 October 1907, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1907. SOCIALISM

tradesmen, and promotes the concentration of great masses of factory laborers '. The evils of the situation are enormously aggravated by the decline of religious faith among the proletariat ; by the vicious; noisome, and unwholesome lives of countless denizens of -the slums in the world's great cities; by the increased . craving for enjoyment among the masses | while the cleavage between the extremes of the social scale has been enormously widened by the oppressions, the exactions, and the unfeeling pride of large classes of capitalists, and the -senseless luxury and- ostentation of many of the upstart nabobs of industry and commerce. Conditions such as these helped to precipitate a revolution in the eighteenth century ; they have created the anarchism of the nineteenth' and the twentieth. * The modern socialist orator can make out a strong case when acting as the destructive critic "of -modern pagan capitalism. There is no need to trick out his denunciations of industrial evils with the frills of fancy and imagination. It was, we think, a tactical mistake as well as a moral error on the part of a visitor now "Eouring New Zealand to eke out his case for socialism by frequent and palpable exaggerations. His school of oratory, like Bernini's school of art, seems to have arisen in a high wind. Here are a few samples of his stormy utterances in Dunedin : The opponents of socialism are described as ' fools and rogues '—likewise numskulls ;-' the editors of the daily press are flunkeys and slaves to the capitalist- ; ' the parson is also a slave to the capitalist ' ; 'if the capitalists got all the money and sat on it, they could not lay _an egg or make a cup of coffee out of it, and if they took the whole Boiling lot of it where they are going, it would not stand the heat \ And so on. The wide difference that exists between European socialism and Uie advanced democracy which sometimes passes under that generic name in Australia and New Zealand, was recognised—and pountled— by the speaker in hot-shot terms. He deplored the ' lack of Ihe proper revolutionary spirit ' as ' the curse of their Labor Parties ' in Australasia, and 'he was tired of the smug content of the average New Zealand workman wftTi His existing position '. The constructive side of socialism was not touched upon. NeitTier did the speaker, as reported, favor his audience with a statement as to which of the many protean forms of socialisrr. he advocated. Judging, .however, by sundry casual references in- his Dunedin speech, it would appear that he favors some or other of the many contending varieties that look to Karl Marx as their prophet. But whether it be the European or American variants of the socialist doctrine— that of tSe orthodox, or the revisionists, or" the possibilists, or the Blanqnists, or the Braussists, or the Allemanists, or the de Leonists, or the rest— we are not told. Our Au6kland correspondent in this issue shows that our socialist visitor knows enough of history to recognise the beneficent function which the Catholic Church in old England exercised upon the condition of the working classes. But it must not foe forgotten that the whole " Marxian system, which he seems . to advocate, is founded upon what is called • fhe materialistic conception of history ' ; it denies any dualism of spirit and matter ; and it is essentially hostile to religion. Some time ago the Archbishop of Wellington luminously demonstrated in our columns the hopeless impracticability of the Marxian theories. And we have more than "once pointed out the dismal failures that have been the shadow of every effort made to founS socialist Utopias on such lines, from. the days of Owen to the present time. Ine true socialism,- the real solution of -"the difficult and pressing industrial problem, are to be found, not in the theories of Karl iuarx or of Louis Blanc or Frederick Angels or any of their schools; but in the principles set forth in those two great documents, the Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. 'On the Condition of Labor ' and 4 On CEristian Democracy '.

#" N a work which appeared three years ago, modern socialism is well described by Cath,/jfl,!F^l rein,as c a permanent phenomenon, to be met with in all civilised countries, wherever in\^[^M dustry is 'highly developed. It is thus clelarly not ' a external appearance Sw*^^« produced artificially .by popular agiltators v—^ ' and demagogues ', but ' a phenomenon rooted in, and nourished by, the soil of modern social conditions '. The same learned writer says :—: — '< The roots of modern (socialism are to be found first of all in the great development of industry and the consequent moumcation of social conditions dating from the latter part of the eighteenth century. {Since the French devolution the unhampered development of industrial forces in unrestricted conipetiti'on has undoubtedly brought about astounding results in the field of technical discoveries and their application to industry ' and commerce. But one of these results was also the great division of society into two hostile classes— a small number of wealthy capitalists, and an immense multitude of laborers — which classes are usually designated respectively as " capital " and " labor ". But above all, the " proletariat "—that .homeless; floating population of our great' cities, which has already assumed gigantic proportions— is the almost inevitable result of modern industry, in. as far as by its machinery it' practically precludes the existence of independent