Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/154

 150 ist evolution. When Engels wrote the apologetic confession which I have just quoted, he also threw the class war as it had been understood up to then out of the armoury of Socialist arguments. The idea of the class war no longer represents the motive forces organising Socialism and forming the Socialist movement. Those who still use it are like those more backward religious communities which express their theologies in the terms used before there was a science of geology.

in mind that the watchword of Socialism is Evolution, not Revolution, and that its battlefield is Parliament, its immediate programme becomes of the utmost importance. In this programme, as in the Socialist theory itself, there are to be found some interesting survivals of a historic past. The revolutionary republicanism of 1848 can be traced both in proposals to abolish the monarchy and to repudiate the National Debt which one meets with in some programmes which seem to have been kept as sacred from the touch of change as some rooms in ancient places where the Merry Monarch slept or