workers that their misery is "a law of Nature." But—how can Socialists use such language? The State has always interfered in the economic life in favour of the capitalist exploiter. It has always granted him protection in robbery, given aid and support for further enrichment. And it could not be otherwise. To do so was one of the functions—the chief mission—of the State.
The State was established for the precise purpose of imposing the rule of the landowners, the employers of industry, the warrior class, and the clergy upon the peasants on the land and the artisans in the city. And the rich perfectly well know that if the machinery of the State ceased to protect them, their power over the labouring classes would be gone immediately.
Socialism, we have said—whatever form it may take in its evolution towards Communism—must find its own form of political organisation. Serfdom and Absolute Monarchy have always marched hand-in-hand. The one rendered the other a necessity. The same is true of Capitalist rule, whose political form is Representative Government, either in a Republic or in a Monarchy. This is why Socialism cannot utilise Representative Government as a weapon for liberating Labour, just as it cannot utilise the Church and its theory of divine right, or Imperialism and Caesarism, with its theory of hierarchy of functionaries, for the same purpose.
A new form of political organisation has to be worked out the moment that Socialist principles shall enter into our life. And it is self-evident that this new form will have to be more popular, more decentralised, and nearer to the folk-mote self-government than representative government can ever be.
This is also the tendency which begins to prevail in the conception of men, the moment they free themselves from the prejudice of authority. If we carefully observe life in this country, in France, and in the States, we see, indeed, a decided tendency towards constituting independent communes, municipal and rural, associations, societies, federations, etc., assuming wide social and economic functions, and connected with each other by free agreement, independent of State intervention. Of course, it is not the German Emperor, or the English Imperialists, or even the Swiss Jacobin Radicals who pursue such aims. These people have their eyes turned backwards. But there is a progressive fraction of society, chiefly among the working men, both in Europe and America, who work hard to create such new channels
