the proprietors of land, for agriculture was then the chief form of industry. From this followed serfdom, villeinage, knights and kings. The progress of industry, in the form of manufacture and commerce with large capital, overthrew the feudal Society, and in place of the feudal relations substituted middle class employers and free workmen. There was production for a cosmopolitan market instead of production for personal use or for a local market. The French Revolution did no more than give legal effect to a de facto revolution. The third estate became dominant; and the ruling element of this second stage of modern history declared itself to be the possession of capital, in place of the mediaval possession of land. Active citizenship has depended on payment of taxes even in France.

The ruling element in the third stage is to be the Working Men; the disinherited are to inherit all things. Their cause is that of humanity in general, for they are not a class; they are the people.

This is the view of Lassalle in the Arbeiter-programm; and of course it is not identical with that of Engels in detail, nor does it involve what we might have expected not only from a student of Hegel but from an editor of Heraclitus, a general principle of development, destructive and disintegrating without limit. But Lassalle has a warmer feeling for Fichte than for Hegel (see Die Philosophie Fichte's und die Bedeutung des deutschen Volksgeistes, 1862). In his book on Acquired Rights (1861) Lassalle expressly discards the Hegelian view of the philosophy of law. There are no absolute categories, deducible from a universal and eternal notion of right and underlying historical law. The categories of the philosophy of right must be historical. The law of nature is itself so; it develops with the human spirit in history. "As the philosophy of religion is the development of the consciousness of God, so the philosophy of right is the development of the consciousness of right among men (System der Erworbene Rechte (ed. 1880; I. 59, 60). The particular case which leads to his discussion of the point is that of "acquired rights." His decision about these is that legislation must not be "retro-active" in the sense of making particular acts

wrong that had by existing laws been right, but may be "retrospective" where a new law alters general social conditions or arrangements that do not come under the individual will. Law may fix the age of majority as 24 instead of 21 without any regard to present "rights," because it is not by a man's voluntary act that he becomes either 21 or 24; and it may alter general rights of property so that a class of things once property may cease to be so. Custom and tradition have nothing inviolable or unalterable in them. The most impressive example of the historical development of a legal notion is that of Inheritance. Testamentary law is nothing if not Roman. Now the essence of the Roman notion of a Will was not that bequest was deduced from the law of property, and was simply a transmission of property; the Roman will was the Roman embodiment of the idea of Immortality.' The testament is meant to cause an identification of the subjective will of the heir with that of the testator, so that the former shall as it were perpetuate the existence of the latter on earth by acting as the latter willed him to act; the heir succeeds not essentially to the possessions but to the will of the testator. This triumph of "abstract inwardness" is the "direct dialectical step towards the deeper inwardness of Christianity, where the immortality was supposed to be not in this world but beyond it." (Erw. Rechte, ed. 1880; II. 22, 26, 186, 187, 430, etc.). In the suus heres the wills are already identical without acceptance of any testament by the heir, because the heir as under the potestas of the head of the family has his will already identified with that of the head. In Intestacy search is made by the law for such persons as have been in potestate of the person concerned, and the general will of the people (the spirit of the nation generally) is taken as the will of this particular person. Otherwise, acceptance (aditio) is necessary to make inheritance an acquired right (ib. 472).

It was quite otherwise in German law, where the essential idea was that there was a moral identity of members of the Family, and birth determined succession. Here

Leibnitz, the most individualistic of philosophers, had propounded a theory of which this was a feature. (Nova Methodus Jurisprudentiæ, pars specialis, $20. See Lassalle, Er. R., II. 501.

too indeed an act of will is essential to the acquired right, but it is the act of begetting on the part of the father-not an act of acceptance on the part of the son (II. 482, 485).

It is clear (Lassalle thinks) that inheritance is neither a matter of mere positive institution nor a matter of unchangeable law of nature. The notion has its stages of development, of which the Roman and the German are two. The regulation of inheritance instituted by the French Convention supplanted the individualism of Roman law (which, though in perverted form, had been ruling the minds of lawyers) by the notion of family inheritance; but the Family had now become a State institution (ib. 499). It was really regulation by the State; and it is evident that Lassalle regards such regulation with favour. It is remarkable that, though Lassalle is on these points opposed to Hegel, he believes himself to be reasoning on Hegel's premises and with Hegel's method (Erw. Rechte, II. 486 n., 488).

This treatise, the most laboured and powerful of the severer works of Lassalle, was not utilized by him in his popular discourses. In the latter he advocated the supplanting of the existing forms of industrial organization by the introduction of a system of co-operative industry organized and supported by the State and not on the voluntary principles recommended by such men as Schulze Delitzsch, whom he delighted to set at naught.' He did not live to carry out his philosophy into his economics. Perhaps his exertions as an agitator would have prevented the achievement, though exile might possibly have become to him, as to Marx, the "bridle of Theages." "

Features common to Lassalle, Engels, and Marx are the economical view of history and the belief that the working classes are now the tools of the other classes and yet worth all the rest. Both these positions well deserve discussion. Socialism owes its strength to them far more than to particular economic theories such as

1 Esp. in his Bastiat-Schulze (1864).

He had planned a treatise on The Systematic Development of the Philosophy of Spirit. Erw. Rechte, II. 486.

A A

that of the Iron Law of Wages or that of Surplus Value, which have been unable to stand criticism.

NOTE

Of the numerous books on Socialism Mr. John Rae's Contemporary Socialism, 2nd ed., 1891, and Mr. W. H. Dawson's German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle, 1888, stand very high, the former for its economics, the latter for its history. They have a judicial tone which is wanting in nearly all the German writings on the subject.

CHAPTER II.

EPILOGUE.

RELATION OF ECONOMICS TO THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION.

WE have finally to consider whether the theory of Evolution, either in its philosophical or in its Darwinian form, is an argument for Socialism, and whether the positions of the Socialists, apart from the theory of evolution, have any measure of truth.

The discussion will seem to many economists to be outside the range of their subject, as the work of economics is mainly analytic and relates to "social statics." But a purely analytical and statical inquiry seems impossible. We can never find all the truth about the present condition of industry in the present itself; and, when we try to do so, we find ourselves altering the meaning of the word "present" at every step. We cannot understand the nature of Work for Wages, for example, without looking backwards to the formation of the capital that made its first payment possible and forwards to the profitable sale of the product which is the condition of its continued payment. The "present" comes to mean a day or a year, a generation or a century, as may suit the purpose of the particular analysis on hand. We may abstract from all causes except the economical; but, if our method led us to abstract from all economical sequences and look only at economical facts without any dynamical or causal connection, it could not lead us to any truth. Economical progress (or at least process) is the object of our inquiry even when we are trying to study what we call the facts of our own time. Whether such economical movement takes place according to the principles of Evolution is therefore not a question beyond the range of economics.

When "evolution" occurs in popular language and when it is said (for example) that all must take place by