The facts connected with the history of communism show that the movements against the institution of private property have taken place in nearly every country, and in almost every age. They have originated with men of such divergent intellectual rank as Plato and Robert Owen, as widely sundered in respect of time, country, and social surroundings as tho Essenes, Sir Thomas More, Saint Simon, and Father Rapp. The mere mention of these names goes some way towards the refutation of the popular conception of a communist as a needy adventurer seeking a means to possess himself of the property of others. There may have been some so-called communists attracted to the movement by the hope of being enabled to live on the labour and industry of their neighbours; but such men have never originated any socialistic movement, and their motives have generally been quickly detected by the genuine communists, who have not infrequently adopted very vigorous means to expel such black sheep from their flock. Among the modern leaders of communistic movements who have actually reduced to practice the theoretical schemes of The Republic and Utopia have been men who have devoted great wealth and rare organizing faculties to the carrying out of their plans for the reconstruction of society. It has been estimated that Robert Owen, during the course of his long life, devoted no less a sum than £60,000 from his own private fortune to the promotion of communistic schemes; what he sacrificed indirectly to his views on social reform cannot be easily estimated. His faculty for the successful conduct of business was so remarkable that at the early age of twenty-six, without a shilling of capital of his own, he was appointed manager of the mills of the Chorlton Company with a salary of £1000 a year, besides one-ninth of the profits realized by the company. There can be no doubt that Owen had the personal qualities which would have enabled him to amass a colossal fortune if his ambition had lain in that direction. The immense pecuniary and personal sacrifices which he made to the cause of communism show that he at least was animated by motives the direct opposite of the selfishness and sloth generally attributed to the advocates of that system. Another leading communist, Saint Simon, was the representative of one of the most ancient families of the French nobility. A career in the army was open to him in which he might easily have satisfied the usual ambition of the class to which he belonged. As a young man he served with distinction through five campaigns.

Many other instances might be given of the disinterestedness of the leaders of communistic schemes. Among American associations one of the most successful as to the number and material prosperity of its members is the society known as the Perfectionists of Oneida and Wallingford. Their founder, John Humphrey Noyes, is the son of a banker, and a man fitted by education and natural gifts to have succeeded in any of the ordinary careers of professional or commercial activity. Whether we look at communism as depicted in the pages of Plato’s Republic and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, or in the practical efforts made to realize these philosophical speculations by such men as Owen and Noyes, we find no justification for the assumption that the movement is one for enabling “idlers and bunglers” to live on the industry and talents of their more energetic and skilful neighbours.

As we are here saying what communism is not, rather than endeavouring to define what it is, this is perhaps the right place to state that communism, meaning thereby community of goods and the abolition of private property, has no connection with the doings of the Commune of Paris which was overthrown in May 1871. The French word Commune is a household word in France for “Township” or “Corporation.” Every town and village in France has its Commune or municipality. In nearly every town and village there is corporate property called Les Biens Communaux, and this property is vested in the corporation or Commune. The similarity, however, of the French word for corporation to ours for expressing the doctrine of community of goods, has led to a great amount of misconception and confusion, even among writers who are generally careful and well informed. The revolution of the Commune was entirely political; it propounded no new economic theories. It arose from a joint effort of many sections of extreme politicians who were agreed in nothing but in demanding the establishment of (1) a democratic republic, and (2) the communal (or corporate) independence of Paris. Only about seven out of the seventy members of the Communal Government were communists in the economic sense, and these seven were among the most thoughtful and least violent of the party to which they belonged. They never had an opportunity of giving any official sanction to their communistic views, and they were gradually thrust on one side by their more violent and unscrupulous comrades. This is therefore not the place to attempt anything like an account of the brief reign of the Commune, which indeed belongs to the history of Paris. It is sufficient to state that its doings were not even tinged with communism in the economic sense of the word.

Communistic schemes have found advocates in almost every age and in many different countries. The foremost men both of thought and action have from time to time been attracted by them. They have been so various in scope, and the amount of detail with which they are described by their authors is so considerable, that it is difficult to get at the underlying principle which is common to them all. It must be remembered that the philosophic communism of Plato and More has been adapted to the wants of actual daily life by rough German peasants and Lancashire operatives; and though of course the actual has differed a good deal from the ideal commune, yet their resemblance is, under the circumstances, very much more striking than their divergence. The one thing that is shared by all communists, whether speculative or practical, is deep dissatisfaction with the economic conditions by which they are surrounded. In Plato’s Republic the dissatisfaction is not limited to merely economic conditions. In his examination of the body politic there is hardly any part which he can pronounce to be healthy. He would alter the life of the citizens of his state from the very moment of birth. Children are to be taken away from their parents and nurtured under the supervision of the state. The old nursery tales, “the blasphemous nonsense with which mothers fool the manhood out of their children,” are to be suppressed. Dramatic and imitative poetry are not to be allowed. Education, marriage, the number of births, the occupations of the citizens are to be controlled by the guardians or heads of the state. The most perfect equality of conditions and careers is to be preserved; the women are to have similar training with the men, no careers and no ambition are to be forbidden to them; the inequalities and rivalries between rich and poor are to cease, because all will be provided for by the state. Other cities are divided against themselves, “Any ordinary city, however small, is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, at war with one another” [Republic, bk. iv. p. 249, Jowett’s translation). But this ideal state is to be a perfect unit; although the citizens are divided into classes according to their capacity and ability, there is none of the exclusiveness of birth, and no inequality is to break the accord which binds all the citizens, both male and female, together into one harmonious whole. The marvellous comprehensiveness of the scheme for the government of this ideal state makes it belong as much to the modern as to the ancient world. Many of the social problems to which Plato draws attention are yet unsolved, and some are in process of solution in the direction indicated by him. He is not appalled by the immensity of the task which he has sketched out for himself and his followers. He admits that there are difficulties to be overcome, but he says in a sort of parenthesis, “Nothing great is easy.” He refuses to be satisfied with half measures and patchwork reforms.

“Enough, my friend! but what is enough while anything remains wanting ?” These sentences indicate the spirit in which philosophical as distinguished from practical communists from the time of Plato till to-day have undertaken to reconstruct human society.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia has very many of the characteristics of The Republic. There is in it the same wonderful power of shaking off the prejudices of the place and time in which it was written. The government of Utopia is described as founded on popular election; community of goods prevailed, the magistrates distributed the instruments of production among the inhabitants, and the wealth resulting from their industry was shared by all. The use of money and all outward ostentation of wealth were forbidden. All meals were taken in common, and they were rendered attractive by the accompaniment of sweet strains of music, while the air was filled by the scent of the most delicate perfumes. More’s ideal state differs in one important respect from Plato’s. There was no community of wives in Utopia. The sacredness of the family relation and fidelity to the marriage contract were recognized by More as indispensable to the wellbeing of modern society. Plato, notwithstanding all the extraordinary originality with which he advocated the emancipation of women, was not able to free himself from the theory and practice of regarding the wife as part and parcel of the property of her husband. The fact, therefore, that he advocated community of property led him also to advocate community of wives. He speaks of “the possession and use of women and children,” and proceeds to show how this possession and use must be regulated in his ideal state. Monogamy was to him mere exclusive possession on the part of one man of a piece of property which ought to be for the benefit of the public. The circumstance that he could not think of wives other wise than as the property of their husbands only makes it the more remarkable that he claimed for women absolute equality of training and careers. The circumstance that communists have so frequently wrecked their projects by attacking marriage and advocating promiscuous intercourse between the sexes may probably be traced to the notion which regards a wife as being a mere item among the goods and chattels of her husband. It is not difficult to find evidence of the survival of this ancient habit of mind. “I will be master of what is mine own,” says Petruchio. “She is my goods, my chattels.”

The Perfectionists of Oneida, a well-known communistic society in the United States which has put into practice community of wives, or, as they call it, complex marriage, justify their extraordinary social system by affirming that there is “no intrinsic difference between property in persons and property in things; and that the same spirit which abolished exclusiveness in regard to money would abolish, if circumstances allowed full scope to it, exclusiveness in regard to women and children” (Nordhoff ’ s Communistic Societies of the United States, pp. 271-2). It is this notion of a wife as property that is responsible for the wild opinions communists have often held in favour of a community of wives and the break-up of family relations. If they could shake off this notion and take hold of the conception of marriage as a contract, there is no reason why their views on the community of property should lead them to think that this contract should not include mutual fidelity and remain in force during the life of the contracting parties. It was probably not this conception of the marriage relation so much as the influence of Christianity which led More to discountenance community of wives in Utopia. It is strange that the same influence did not make him include' the absence of slavery as one of the characteristics of his' ideal state. On the contrary, however, we find in Utopia the anomaly of slavery existing side by side with institutions which otherwise embody the most absolute personal, political, and religious freedom. The presence of slaves in Utopia is made use of to get rid of one of the practical difficulties of communism, viz., the performance of disagreeable work. In a society where one man is as good as another, and the means of subsistence are guaranteed to all alike, it is easy to imagine that it would be difficult to ensure the performance of the more laborious, dangerous, and offensive kinds of labour. In Utopia, therefore, we are expressly told that “all the uneasy and sordid services” are performed by slaves. The institution of slavery was also made supplementary to the criminal system of Utopia, as the slaves were for the most part men who had been con victed of crime; slavery for life was made a substitute for capital punishment.

In many respects, however, More’s views on the labour question were vastly in advance of his own time, and indeed of ours. He repeats the indignant protest of the Republic that existing society is a warfare between rich and poor. “The rich,” he says, “devise every means by which they may in the first place secure to themselves what they have amassed by wrong, and then take to their own use and profit, at the lowest possible price, the work and labour of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting these devices in the name of the public, then they become law.” One might imagine these words had been quoted from the programme of the International Society, so completely is their tone in sympathy w ith the hardships of the poor in all ages. More shared to the full the keen sympathy with the hopeless misery of the poor which has been the strong motive power of nearly all speculative communism. The life of the poor as he saw it was so wretched that he said, “Even a beast’s life seems enviable !” Besides community of goods and equality of conditions, More advocated other means of ameliorating the condition of the people. Although the hours of labour were limited to six a day there was no scarcity, for in Utopia every one worked; there was no idle class, no idle individual even. The importance of this from an economic point of view is insisted on by More in a passage remarkable for the importance which he attaches to the industrial condition of women. “And this you will easily apprehend,” he says, “if you consider how great a part of all other nations is quite idle. First, women generally do little, who are the half of mankind.” Translated into modern language his proposals comprise universal compulsory education, a reduction of the hours of labour to six a day, the most modern principles of sanitary reform, a complete revision of criminal legislation, and the most absolute religious toleration. The romantic form which Sir Thomas More gave to his dream of a new social order found many imitators. The Utopia may be regarded as the prototype of Campanella’s City of the Sun, Harrington’s Oceana, Bacon’s Nova Atlantis, Defoe’s Essay of Projects, Fénelon’s Voyage dans Vile des Plaisirs, and other works of minor importance.

It is remarkable that all communists have made a great point of the importance of universal education. All ideal communes have been provided by their authors with a perfect machinery for securing the education of every child. One of the first things done in every attempt to carry communistic theories into practice, has been to establish a good school and guarantee education to every child. The first impulse to national education in the present century probably sprang from the very marked success of Robert Owen’s schools in connection with the cotton mills at New Lanark. At a time (1806) when popular education was in the lowest possible condition, Owen, as manager and part owner of the New Lanark Mills, proposed to his partners to spend £5000 upon new schools. They not unnaturally objected to an expenditure at that time quite unprecedented; whereupon Owen bought his partners out for £84,000, and took his own course upon the educational system he had brought forward. It is to be observed that communists have seldom or never relied on their peculiar system alone for the regeneration of society. Community of goods has indeed been their central idea, but they have almost invariably supported it by other projects of less questionable utility. Compulsory education, free trade, and law reform, the various movements connected with the improvement of the condition of women, have found their earliest advocates among theoretical and practical communists. The communists denounce the evils of the present state of society; the hopeless poverty of the poor, side by side with the self-regarding luxury of the rich, seems to them to cry aloud to Heaven for the creation of a new social organization. They proclaim the necessity of sweeping away the institution of private property, and insist that this great revolution, accompanied by universal education, free trade, a perfect administration of justice, and a due limitation of the numbers of the community, would put an end to half the self-made distresses of humanity. Has it never occurred to them that a similarly happy result might be attained if all these subsidiary reforms were carried out, leaving the principles of private property and competition to their old predominance in the economic world ì If the principles of communism and of private property are to be fairly compared, the comparison must not be between communism as it might be and private property as it is. Communism to be successful requires to be accompanied by important reforms, towards which existing society founded on private property is gradually finding its way. The power which society, as at present constituted, has shown of adapting itself to altered circumstances, and of assimilating by slow degrees the more valuable concomitants of the most revolutionary theories, is strong proof that it does not deserve to be dealt with in the summary manner advocated by the communists.

We find in many socialistic writings of thirty or forty years ago the assumption expressed or implied that, in society as it is, the most valuable and essential reforms are impracticable. Μ. Louis Blanc, for instance, in his book called L ’ Organisation du Travail, first published in 1839, says that in the existing order of society the spread of education among the masses would be dangerous,—would, in fact, be impossible. This, if true, would be the strongest possible indictment against the existing order of society. But how have events falsified the assumptions made in the following passage î “On a vu pourquoi, dans le système actuel, l’éducation des enfants du peuple était impossible Beaucoup d’esprits sérieux pensent qu’il serait dangereux aujourd’hui de répandre l’instruction dans les rangs du peuple, et ils ont raison. Mais comment ne s’aperçoivent-ils pas que ce danger de l’éducation est une preuve accablante de l’absurdité de notre ordre social Ì Dans cet ordre social, tout est faux: le travail n’y est pas en honneur; les professions les plus utiles y sout dédaignées; un laboureur y est tout au plus...