ment, or those who have influence with these-that soon or late the product of the tax passes.

On all these grounds taxation should have regard to the different conditions of the contributors, and especially as respects superfluities, and so should not fall, as it generally does, on the people, but on the rich. Sumptuary taxes,-taxes on costly articles, livery, carriages, the mass of objects of luxury, or amusement—are recommended as forming the least onerous and most certain means of raising a revenue for the State.

Thus then, finally, we see that Rousseau was a Socialist. He is a preacher of equality, and the most powerful. The greatest evil is inequality. A good government should aim by good laws and wise measures at preventing inequality from growing too great. Education should be a state function. But all this is Socialism, and State Socialism; not Socialism in the new sense of collective ownership and cooperative labour, because this particular form of the general thing would have been irrelevant to the economical circumstances of the time, and inconceivable before the industrial revolution, and the large system of production and concentration of capital in few hands which was the result of that revolution, itself scarcely then begun. Something, indeed, like the idea of land nationalization he had in his mind; to be effected by the relief of the peasants from accumulated feudal and fiscal burdens, so as to leave them owners, as was in fact largely done by the Re

4

In the "Economie Politique," in particular, he gives expression to it.

volution; but he had no idea of the nationalization of capital, the favourite idea of Collectivist Socialists. He aimed in general at the diffusion of property, which if it were done and could be maintained, the better part of the new Socialists' end would be secured without confiscation and the danger attending a general social transformation.

VI.

WITH respect to Rousseau's direct influence on Socialistic development, M. Janet thinks that he has "furnished to the Socialists formulas rather than arguments;" but allows that "he is incontestably the founder of modern communism." On the other hand, M. de Laveleye traces the Socialism of Fichte, which contains Collectivism in germ, as well as the Anarchism of Bakunin, to the ideas of Rousseau.

The Abbé Mably, however, M. Janet admits, is a disciple of Rousseau. In his "Législation ou Principes des Lois" (1776) Mably attacks private property, and defends Communism as the natural system; so natural that the real difficulty is to explain how property ever arose. Men are equal; as they issue from the hands of Nature, they are all similar. It is the inequality of fortune that makes, through inequality of education, the great seeming inequality of talents and ability. Some natural differences of gift there are, but they are not great, and they bear

5 In maintaining this proposition, Mably is in agreement with Hobbes for the most part, but not with the St. Simonian

no proportion to the monstrous inequalities of fortune.

But though Communism is according to Nature, Mably knows as well as Rousseau that it is impracticable for the present; the opposite system of property having such deep and widespread roots. The only thing left to be done is for legislators to aim at a return to Communism by slow stages, or at least to take practicable steps in its direction. To this end, he recommends measures some of them similar to those suggested by Rousseau; namely, direct taxes on land; sumptuary laws; laws regulating successions ; prohibition of testaments; agrarian laws limiting the extent of landed property.

The cruder Communism of Morellet as given in his Code of Nature (1755) does not appear to have been due to the influence of Rousseau, but rather to general ideas of the kind "in the air;" yet as his scheme was that which, according to M. Janet, Babœuf afterwards attempted to carry out by force in France, and as our modern Collectivists appear to have taken some hints from it, it may be referred to here. Morellet's fundamental laws are three: no property; every one to be a public servant or functionary; and every one to do real work, as insisted on in the Collectivism of to-day. Production

6

Socialists, nor with the common verdict of mankind, so long as Nature produces Newtons, Watts, or in general what are called men of genius.

6 This is a point much insisted upon by the Collectivist Socialists: see Gronlund's " Co-operative Commonwealth," p. 146.

F

and distribution are to be regulated by the State; education likewise, and in fact the whole of life, as in More's "Utopia," to the circle of ideas in which, though even less practicable in the eighteenth century than in the sixteenth, Morellet's scheme belongs.

A much nearer approach to the Socialism of to-day is made by Fichte, the great German idealist philosopher. His theory of property is remarkable, and his practical scheme founded on it was prophetic, if not suggestive of the Collectivist scheme. According to Fichte, the only legitimate origin of property is labour. Whoever does not work, has no right to the means of existence from society. On the other hand, he who has not the means of living is not bound to recognize or respect the property of others, seeing that as regards him the principles of the social contract have been violated." "Every one should have some property; society owes to all the means of work, and all should work in order to live; " principles which if logically carried out would justify the right to labour and a good deal of the Socialist creed. But Fichte does more than lay down the principles on which society should be based as regards property. He sketches in clear and bold outlines the form of a society and an industrial system embodying his ideas of right and social justice. "Production and distribution should be collectively organized; every one should receive for a fixed amount of labour a fixed amount of capital, which would constitute his property according to right." Property

7 Laveleye's "Socialism of To-day."

8

would thus be made universal. In the spirit of Rousseau, he maintains that "no person should enjoy superfluities so long as any person lacks necessaries; for the right of property in objects of luxury can have no foundation until each citizen has his share in the necessaries of life. Farmers and labourers should form partnerships so as to produce the greatest result with the least exertion"-an ensemble of ideas which, as M. de Laveleye, says, are "manifestly inspired by Rousseau and the eighteenth-century philosophers, and in which we have the essential ideas of contemporary Socialism as regards both the notion of right and its realization." In the notion in particular that for a "fixed amount of labour, every one should receive a fixed amount of capital," it is not difficult to see in germ the idea of Karl Marx that the quantity of social labour measured in time, is the measure of value, and still more easy to perceive that it is identical with the Collectivist law of distribution that all should receive, in return for hours of labour, labour cheques, or goods that cost an equal number of hours of labour. In fact, if we join to this Morellet's idea that every one is to be a functionary of the State, we have in outline and in essence the whole of the new Socialism on its constructive, as distinct from its critical side.

According to Laveleye, even Bakunin's Anarchism is traceable to Rousseau conjointly with the German philosophers of the present century, and undoubtedly the incoherent ideal of the anarchist, so far as it can

8 The Socialism of To-day," p. 8.