Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/229

 Rh When it disappears a difficult parliamentary situation will be created for the Socialists as they then, either as an independent factor without representation in the Cabinet or as a co-operating wing with representation in the Cabinet, will have to keep a coalition government in office.

Distracted with revolutionary impulses and with the political unsettlement around, Socialism has taken only a fitful foothold in places like Russia, Spain, Portugal and the minor European States.

The Russian movement is of peculiar interest and is in many respects sui generis. The communal psychology of the Russian which he has inherited from the social organisation of serfdom and communism in which he lived till but a generation or so ago, made him but little susceptible to worldly goods and materialist enticements, and when the political freedom of the rest of Europe began to agitate the minds of the intellectuals of Russia, a movement partly Liberal and partly Socialist began. It found expression first of all in novels like Tchernychevsky's What is to be done? and finally bred Nihilism in polities, and a revival in literature. The untamable Bakunin, the courtly Herzen and the chivalrous Lavroff were in exile, but moved amongst the Russian students whom the revival in learning was sending to universities in France and Switzerland. The movement