workers of the United States should understand the tremendous responsibility which thus lies upon their shoulders.
Standing as we do between two great centuries in the history of the race, the century of capitalism and the century of socialism,—the day before us and the night behind—it is essential that Social-Democrats in their respective countries should keep one another thoroughly well informed as to the progress of the cause. Sooner or later we must all act together if we are to take full advantage of the developments going on around us in order to avoid the dangers that might follow upon a general attempt at reconstruction without sufficient knowledge and full international agreement. So closely bound together are modern industrial communities that what seriously affects one cannot fail to influence the others—as international crises have shown us time after time. In the same way, therefore, that it is of the greatest importance to English Social-Democrats to know so far as it can be known, the truth about the industrial and social development of the United States, it is of no less significance to Americans to have correct information in regard to what is occurring here. Attempts to make out that either society is more advanced towards the next great stage in human evolution than it really is can only do harm and tend to arrest intelligent progress.
Now there has been a tendency of late for Americans who have come to England in order to study our social and economic conditions to exaggerate absurdly the work which has been done and to advance the point at which we have arrived. This arises from the fact that most of the visitors from the other side of the Atlantic have been "put through," to use an Americanism, by the Fabian Society. That collection of middle-class gentlemen and ladies has learnt that self-advertisement is far more useful than first-rate ability under existing conditions and they lose no opportunity of endeavoring to prove to visitors to our shores that they are controlling the issues in this England of ours with great capacity to nice bourgeois-Socialist ends. They are great on gas and water. Tramways and model lodging-houses move their very souls. The trade union and the co-operative store awaken their intelligence to a sempiternal contemplation of economic harmonies. The etherealization of the town council and the apotheosis of the municipality constitute their highest conception of the Socialist state. If Bastiat could be resuscitated in a municipal waistcoat and Schulze-Delitzsch could revisit the glimpses of the moon girt with a lord mayor's chain of office, you would have at once two of the ablest and most influential members of the Fabian Society. Now so long as these worthies kept their half-baked rubbish for home consumption no great harm was done, but when it is exported to America as genuine then some mischief follows. If a few eccentrics choose to make twelve o'clock at eleven the only
