degree the Independent Labor Party, have done much to persuade such workers as they could get at that we Social-Democrats [Socialists of the Marx school], though we constitute by far the strongest single political party in Europe, don't know what we are about. Mischievous work of this sort acting upon ignorance and apathy is even more injurious than downright opposition.
Now all who read carefully through that summary and take the trouble to reflect upon its various points will form a reasonable idea of the difficulties which we English Social-Democrats have to encounter and overcome. These difficulties are none the less serious because they do not take the shape of violent antagonism. Apathy and half-hearted agreement are harder to fight against, in a sense, than vigorous antagonism. Nevertheless, thorough-going scientific Socialism is making way. Our ideas and even our own phrases have made their way into the whole of the literature of the country. In every department of political and social advance Social-Democrats keep the initiative, and the Trade Unions, reactionary as they still are in many respects, are increasingly ready to follow our lead. In fact, as I have often said, Socialism in England is like a vessel filled with fluid in a laboratory. It is fluid as we look at it; but give it a rough jog and crystallization sets in almost immediately. That necessary shock may come at any moment. The awful catastrophe in British India, where we are deliberately starving millions of people to death while drawing 80,000,000 of dollars in gold from the famine-stricken country this very year on Government account alone; the condition of permanent unrest and disaffection which we have carefully created at enormous cost in Africa; the growing antagonism to Russia in China and to France in the basin of the Mediterranean; the certainty of a great industrial crisis at home at the end of this period of "boom"—any one of these causes, or all of them together, may precipitate the realization of the coming period. At any rate, we are working vigorously on, and I have no doubt that in the twentieth century England will do her share to bring about the great Industrial Co-operative Commonwealth.
