sense of historic continuity, and of a common national heritage, of family affection, and of home ties, can only serve,' &c.

The ending of the sentence matters not. At this supreme effort one who knows anything about Socialism can only laugh, unless good taste twinges at the bombast. The Socialist here becomes like

unto some of the beasts of the Revelation, and the anti-Socialist campaign becomes like unto one of those crusades which queer religious fanatics embark upon occasionally to ward off a reign of Satan.

If the anti-Socialist who indulges in these dreams of beasts and monsters were asked to tell us whence they come he might produce a few extracts from the private opinions of one or two men who happen to be Socialists. Marx, applying Hegelianism to Sociology and led at the same time by the doctrines of the early English Radicals, preached a class struggle; Mr. Blatchford, in the exercise of his own judgment, comes to the conclusion that Haeckel's monism is an adequate philosophy; Mr. Bax, following the Liberal school of sociologists of a generation ago, and accepting the practice of Society at the present moment as a rational thing, bases the family (as indeed do the Spectator and other anti-Socialist protagonists) on property, and in consequence makes some awkward deductions (being much more logical than the Spectator and the other protagonists). The result is that the Socialist movement has not only to answer for its own theory, but is supposed to be responsible for everything evil and unpopular which any one of its members privately holds. The grim joke about such violent effusions as that which I have quoted is that they are made in defence of an organisation of Society which is sacrificing family life to profits, which is dragging mothers away from their homes, and throwing children into the streets and factories to earn something, and which has necessitated, but always opposed, the erection of an elaborate system of legislative protection so that the family may have a chance of surviving; it has created a dualism in religion, for the operations of competitive commercialism make it ruinous to adopt as guides for Monday's business the precepts of Sunday's preaching; it has been destructive of those kindlier human thoughts and feelings upon which a spiritual life leans; generally, by subordinating humanity to material property, it has defied the creation of a moral order of Society. When the Socialist organises into a system both of thought and politics those tendencies and separate legislative proposals and policies which have been protecting our moral and religious life and its organisation-particularly the familythrough the menacing reign of Individualism, he is assailed by the accusation that he is to pull down what his forerunners guarded and destroy what his pioneers cherished!

When to their accusations of moral obliquity our critics add charges of intellectual ineptitude and tell us that we have no sense of historic continuity or of a common national heritage, and such like,

the grimness of the joke becomes still broader. If Socialists have done anything at all, they have implanted a sense of historical continuity amongst the masses of the people. The breath of their life is historic continuity. They were the first to bring into actual politics the Hegelian conception of rational social change and to apply evolution to political methods. As I have shown earlier in this paper, Mr. Hoare, like most anti-Socialist critics, only laughs at evolutionary politics because its method is unfamiliar, and yet without rhyme or reason drags in historical continuity as a distinguishing mark of his own political faith.

As his symphony sinks more calmly to rest, he turns to Social Reform, all unknowing that that is the path to Socialism. For, if Socialism is not a theory of sudden revolution but of social transformation brought about by a readjustment of social functions, it is a thing of paths,' and not of incidents.' The path to Socialism consists of the practical treatment of problems like unemployment, and the carrying out of changes in the State, all of which increase the efficiency of national organisation and the total of collective property, and decrease the amount of economic parasitism in the community. Our method, therefore, is Social Reform guided by rational conceptions of historic continuity. What other kind of Social Reform is there to take the place of ours? Surely not a haphazard yielding to popular clamour, without any clear conception of whither we are drifting, which is too often the case with Liberal and Tory pledges and programmes. If not, upon what principle is a rival programme and policy of Social Reform to be constructed? Here lies work for the anti-Socialists. Are we Socialists right or wrong in our interpretation of historical drift and of contemporary change? Much can be said on both sides, but I put in a plea humbly and respectfully that opponents have yet discovered where the ground of battle

few of our

is. They are like honest Falstaffs generally without a gleam of humour or knavery-hacking posts, whilst the Socialist, almost the attack has been its own undoing. People do not believe in goblins unmolested, pursues his propaganda. The unbridled wildness of and devils now, even when labelled Socialism and Socialist. Mr. Hoare's be a pleasant interlude in the serious discussion of modern social reversion to the nursery for a villain prototype of the Socialist may problems and political ideas, but it is rather a footnote to Peter Pan chapter in the criticism of Socialism. ot, at the most, an appendix to some millennarian rhapsody than a

J. RAMSAY MACDONALD,

LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS A
TARIFF REFORMER.

WHEN Mr. Winston Churchill was speaking at Birmingham the other day, he made some interesting references to the speeches of his distinguished father delivered in the same city in opposition to Mr. Bright, just twenty-four years ago. He spoke of Lord Randolph as, at that time, coquetting with Fair Trade.' And in the Life of his father with which he delighted the world two years ago a work admirable alike for its modest restraint, for its candour, and for its pathetic eloquence-Mr. Churchill has taken much the same view of Lord Randolph's attitude towards the fiscal question. His somewhat scanty references to the subject-based mainly on two speeches delivered by Lord Randolph, at Sunderland and Stockton respectively, in the year following his retirement from the Exchequer, and on his correspondence with my old friend Mr. Louis Jennings, a somewhat extreme Fair Trader-give one rather the impression that Lord Randolph took up the question of Tariff Reform as a fad, played with it awhile, and then grew tired of it and flung it away.

It may seem presumptuous to question the accuracy of the view of his own father's policy on an important point, taken by a son so capable, so fearless, and so painstaking as Mr. Churchill. But I remember that, at the period in question, Mr. Churchill must have been too young to have any intelligent appreciation of such matters, and therefore I venture, in the interests of historical truth, to show cause why I think his view is wrong, or at least inadequate. Of his father's Irish policy, Mr. Churchill-in defiance of a vast mass of ill-natured or even slanderous whisperings-boldly declares No Unionist politician has a clearer record' (vol. ii. page 56). Of the absolute truth of that statement I am firmly convinced. But I think Mr. Churchill might have said the same of Lord Randolph's fiscal policy with even stronger reason.

During the whole of the period referred to, both as a Conservative candidate and as a member of Parliament, I was an admirer and close follower of Lord Randolph Churchill. As the borough which I had the honour to represent in the House of Commons, North

Kensington, is interlaced with South Paddington along a considerable boundary-line, I had numerous opportunities of standing on the same platform with him and listening to his speeches. I had the privilege of being on terms of personal friendship with him. Indeed, at the very time when he was fighting Mr. Bright in Birmingham, I was one of a band of political friends who held the fort for him in Paddington under the auspices of Lady Randolph Churchill (whose popularity there was not inferior to his own) and of Lord Howe, then Lord Curzon. So that I had some special knowledge of his views on the fiscal questionthe more so as I had been a Fair Trade candidate in Whitby and in one of the divisions of the Tower Hamlets, and had fought and won the 1885 election in North Kensington mainly on that question.

The view that I took of Lord Randolph's policy in this respect --and I think many other Randolphians agreed with me-was briefly as follows:

(1) He was an earnest and whole-hearted believer in Tariff Reform -though the term itself was then unknown-exactly in the form in which it has been subsequently defined and crystallised by the genius of Mr. Chamberlain. That is to say, he believed in such a reform of our existing tariff-a tariff which he invariably denounced as absurd as would combine the two theories, supplementary and necessary to each other, of Fair Trade and Imperial Preference, without Protection.

(2) In early days, when member for Woodstock, he was willing to accept Imperial Preference, even without Fair Trade.

(3) In his famous speech at Blackpool, early in 1884, he seemed inclined to accept Fair Trade, at any rate in the form of Retaliation, even without Imperial Preference. And I believe he remained in this frame of mind, at least until the General Election of November 1885 -and perhaps until the Home Rule split in 1886.

(4) But at Stockton, in October 1887, he definitely declared that a policy of Fair Trade by itself, without Imperial Preference, was impossible, as it would not benefit the agricultural population. He added that he approved of a small duty on corn, as it yielded a good revenue, and it certainly could not by any possibility affect the price of bread '-but that if Fair Trade means a general return to the imposition all round of high duties on foreign imports, I say, before I make one step in that direction, I must have distinct and clear and forcible evidence of a national demand for such a policy.'

(5) Finally, in his last words on this subject-in a letter written to Mr. Arnold White, the Liberal-Unionist candidate for Tyneside in 1892 he declared he could see 'no cause for alarm' in a measure of Imperial Preference designed to benefit the Labour interest.

Now, all this is pure and unadulterated Tariff Reform, as formulated and preached by Mr. Chamberlain, as set out by Mr. Balfour in his' Insular Free Trade' and many other addresses and speeches, and

as presented to the country, and rapturously accepted, in the recent by-elections in Mid Devon, South Hereford, Worcester, and South Leeds. I at once admit that Lord Randolph's declarations at Stockton in 1887 were something of a disappointment to most, perhaps nearly all, of his warmest supporters at the time. But the bitter pill to swallow' -of which Mr. Louis Jennings sadly wrote-was not so much the line of argument he chose to adopt, which nearly throughout the speech was purely destructive, but rather the absence of any attempt at a constructive policy, or any suggestion of an intention of putting himself at the head of a movement to combat the evils he depicted in such lurid colours. He jeered at the Cobden School,' which, he said, had long 'ceased to have any practical existence.' He dwelt on the slender hopes of any speedy amelioration' in the 'serious condition of British manufacture and agriculture.' And therefore, judging from his character and his achievements, his followers looked for him to lead the forces of reform to remedy these evils. And who shall say that he would not have done so, but for the approach of those heart-breaking mental and physical disabilities, so tenderly and sadly described by his son, that prematurely shrouded his life in gloom, and brought to an untimely and tragic end a career of meteoric splendour?

However that may be, I will now endeavour briefly to substantiate these five statements as showing, when taken together, Lord Randolph Churchill's real mind in regard to Tariff Reform.

And first, as to his desire for closer union with the Colonies and India, and his leaning towards Imperial Preference. Mr. Churchill throws some doubt on Lord Randolph's Imperialism (Life, vol. ii., p. 117), but all his addresses and speeches seem to me to be full of the idea in its widest form. We see it very early in his Parliamentary life. In his address to the electors of Woodstock, on the very first occasion on which he sought to enter Parliament, he struck the keynote of his future policy in the following words:

The Colonial Empire of Great Britain, offering as it does a field of development for the talent, energy, and labour of the sons of our overburdened island, will continually demand the attention of the Legislature. I would support all effort which would tend to facilitate the means of emigration, and would at the same time strengthen and consolidate the ties which unite the Colonies with the Mother Country.

This is what I understand by Imperialism. And nine years later, when Lord Randolph was addressing the great democratic constituency of Central Birmingham, he advanced a step further. With that absolute trust in the common-sense and the patriotism of the British democracy which is the very essence of the Imperialist faith— and which is in sharp contrast with the timidity of those well-meaning politicians who feared, till Mid Devon opened their eyes, that the British working man could always be put off his love for the British