5. The Proletariate.

So much for political difficulties. They have been the difficulties of democracies in past times, and Socialism will not be exempt from them. Rather, as being the most democratic of democracies, it will experience them in an aggravated form. There remains a social difficulty peculiarly incident to the constitution we are now considering. The only source of private wealth here will be wages. That is to say, wages will be the only lawful source : but it is not to be expected that the greed of having, and the dislike of working, will be extinguished in the heart of man. On the contrary, when wealth by the force of law and public opinion is made a mere thing to squander and enjoy, men will first scrape together a little wage, then quit work altogether and spend their earnings wildly; then come back with less inclination than before to work, agitate for higher wages, abuse their foremen, rant and cabal in the Assembly, steal the wages of a more industrious neighbour, embezzle the gild-money ; or they will borrow at usury, as gamblers contract their debts in disregard of legal sanction, from some canny workman who will let them have part of his wages for a consideration. Saving money for commercial gain is certainly not the noblest motive that a man can have for suppressing his spendthrift and riotous appetites : yet it is a motive, and one which poor humanity can ill afford to lose. That motive is flung aside and lost by Socialism.

There is an ugly foreign word, unknown to our fathers, that Socialists now use as a watchword, the Proletariate. It means the people who have nothing but their labour to live by, and who give birth to children as poor as themselves. Socialism promises to be the enfranchisement, aye, the enthronement, of the Proletariate. But Socialism once established would witness the speedy development of a Proletariate within the Proletariate thus ennobled and crowned. In the days when the workmen are to have all, and all are to be workmen, there will grow up in the vitals of this new society a class of drones, of workmen who have gone to the bad ; degraded, debauched, and dissolute creatures, whom no gild will employ, and who have no mind to belong anywhere where work is to be done. People like these—“ stinging drones ” Plato calls them—are, in countries like England and France at present, systematically coerced and kept under by force, the doing, Socialists say, of the bourgeoisie. But in the new republic to come they will be emancipated, on the principle that one man is as good as another : so they will sway from side to side like unsecured cargo in the hold of the political vessel. Their votes in the Assembly will be bidden for by the political adventurer, the Clodius of the future : one day they will shout for a Clodius, another for a Caesar. This is the revolution that is preparing in the womb of the Revolution itself.

It may be said that Socialism will disfranchise these drones, every man that will not work, and treat them as criminals. But that would be to make labour obligatory, an intention which at least some modern Socialists disclaim. Besides, once disfranchisement sets in, many may be found to deserve it.