Meanwhile the socialist agitation also goes forward.  English Socialism comes under our consideration so far only as it affects the working-class.  The English Socialists demand the gradual introduction of possession in common in home colonies embracing two to three thousand persons who shall carry on both agriculture and manufacture and enjoy equal rights and equal education.  They demand greater facility of obtaining divorce, the establishment of a rational government, with complete freedom of conscience and the abolition of punishment, the same to be replaced by a rational treatment of the offender.  These are their practical measures, their theoretical principles do not concern us here.  English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustice toward the proletariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The Socialists are thoroughly tame and peaceable, accept our existing order, bad as it is, so far as to reject all other methods but that of winning public opinion.  Yet they are so dogmatic that success by this method is for them, and for their principles as at present formulated, utterly hopeless.  While bemoaning the demoralisation of the lower classes, they are blind to the element of progress in this dissolution of the old social order, and refuse to acknowledge that the corruption wrought by private interests and hypocrisy in the property-holding class is much greater.  They acknowledge no historic development, and wish to place the nation in a state of Communism at once, overnight, not by the unavoidable march of its political development up to the point at which this transition becomes both possible and necessary.  They understand, it is true, why the working-man is resentful against the bourgeois, but regard as unfruitful this class hatred, which is, after all, the only moral incentive by which the worker can be brought nearer the goal.  They preach instead, a philanthropy and universal love far more unfruitful for the present state of England.  They acknowledge only a psychological development, a development of man in the abstract, out of all relation to the Past, whereas the whole world rests upon that Past, the individual man included.  Hence they are too abstract, too metaphysical, and accomplish little.  They are recruited in part from the working-class, of which they have enlisted but a very small fraction representing, however, its most educated and solid elements.  In its present form, Socialism can never become the common creed of the working-class; it must condescend to return for a moment to the Chartist standpoint.  But the true proletarian Socialism having passed through Chartism, purified of its bourgeois elements, assuming the form which it has already reached in the minds of many Socialists and Chartist leaders (who are nearly