Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Socialism and Politics (1903).djvu/9

 Rh channes of power which the present State provides for the ruling middle classes.

Look at education! They destroy with a sure and clever hand all that had been done in 1800–1875 for wresting instruction out of the hands of the clergy. Why should they not, when it was the once menacing but now tamed Socialist politicians who have helped at the last election the Conservatives to be so powerful in Parliament? The School Board teacher had ceased to tell the poor, "Suffer, it's the will of the creator that you should be poor." On the contrary, he told them: "Hope; try yourselves to shake off your misery!" The slum mother began to get into the habit of going to the School Board teacher to tell of her needs and sorrows, instead of going to the parson, as she formerly did.—Down, then, with the School Boards! And why not? Why should they not dare anything when they know that it was the Socialists, the politicians who had helped them to win such a power in Parliament! Even in France, where they ostensibly fight to free the schools from the clergy, the best and largest colleges are in the hands of the Jesuits—within a stone's throw of the Chamber of Deputies. Everywhere the middle class return to religion, everywhere they work to bring the clergyman, with his ignorance and his eternal fire, back to the school—and the working men are told to take no interest in these matters, to laisser faire and to study John Gorst's program of paternal State legislation.

There was in the years 1800–1875 a powerfully destructive force at work—the materialistic philosophy. It produced the wonderful revival of sciences, and led to the wonderful discoveries of the last quarter of a century, it induced men to think. It freed the minds of the workers ….. "Down, then, with Materialism." is now the outcry of the middle classes. "Long live metaphysics, long live Hegel, Kant, and the Dialectic method!" Why not? They know that in this direction, too, the reaction will find no opposition from the Neo-Socialists. They are also dialecticians, Hegelians, they also worship economic metaphysics, as has been so well shown by Tcherkesoff in his "Pages of Socialist History."

Happily enough, there is one element in the present life