stic writers, in criticizing and modifying the
average circle of ideas, in bringing conceptions that had once seemed
weird, outcast and altogether fantastic, more and more within the
range of acceptable practicality.

The first early Socialisms were most various and eccentric upon the
question of government and control. They had no essential political
teaching. Many, but by no means all, were inspired by the democratic
idealism of the first French Revolution. They believed in a mystical
something that was wiser and better than any individual,--the People,
the Common Man. But that was by no means the case with all of them.
The Noyes community was a sort of Theocratic autocracy; the Saint
Simonian tendency was aristocratic. The English Socialism that in the
middle Victorian period developed partly out of the suggestions of
Owen's beginnings and partly as an independent fresh outpouring of the
struggling Good Will in man, that English Socialism that found a voice
in Ruskin and in Maurice and Kingsley and the Christian Socialists,
was certainly not democratic. It kept much of what was best in the
"public spirit" of contemporary English life, and it implied if it did
not postulate a "governing class." Benevolent and even generous in
conception, its exponents betray all too often the ties of social
habituations, the limited circle of ideas of English upper and upper
middle-class life, easy and cultivated, well served and distinctly,
most unmistakably, authoritative.

While the experimental Utopian Socialisms gave a sort of variegated
and conflicting pattern of a reorganized industrialism and
(incidentally to that) a new heaven and earth, the benevolent
Socialism, Socialistic Liberalism and Socialistic philanthropy of the
middle Victorian period, really went very little further in effect
than a projected amelioration and moralization of the relations of
rich and poor. It needed the impact of an entirely new type of mind
before Socialism began to perceive its own significance as an ordered
scheme for the entire reconstruction of the world, began to realize
the gigantic breadth of its implications.

CHAPTER XI

REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM

Sec. 1.

It was Karl Marx who brought the second great influx of suggestion
into the intellectual process of Socialism. Before his time there does
not seem to have been any clear view of economic relationships as
having laws of development, as having interactions that began and wen