Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/32

 a form of State, society, and education corresponding to the demands of reason in order to establish happiness and virtue on a firm and eternal foundation. Here we arrive at the revolutionary essence of the French Materialism, which indicts the existing State as the source of immorality. With that it raises itself above the level of Epicureanism; but, at the same time it weakens the position of its own Ethics.

For it is no mere question of inventing the best form of State and society. These have got to be fought for; the powers that be must be confronted and overthrown in order to establish an empire of virtue. That requires, however, great moral zeal, and where is that to come from if the existing society is so bad that it prevents altogether the growth of morality or virtue? Must not morality be already there in order that a higher society may arise? Is if not necessary that the moral should be alive in us before the moral order can become a fact? But how is a moral ideal to be evolved from a vicious world?

To that we obtain no satisfactory answer.

In very different fashion to the French did the Englishmen of the 18th century endeavour to explain the moral law. They showed themselves in general less bold and more inclined to compromise, in character with the history of England until the Reformation. Their insular position was especially favourable to their economic development during this period. They were driven thereby to make sea voyages, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, owing to the Colonial system formed the quickest road to a fortune. It kept England free from all the burdens and ravages of wars on land, such as exhausted the European Powers. Thus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England acquired more wealth than all the Powers of Europe, and placed herself, so far as economic position was concerned, at their head. But when new classes and new class antagonisms, and with them new social problems arise in a country at an earlier date than elsewhere, the new classes attain only a small degree of class-consciousness, and still remain, to a