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184 impressive manifestation of socialistic tendencies. Its development is in connection with the municipal ownership of public utilities. What is called “gas and water socialism” has generally been the beginning of these municipal enterprises. There are some successes and a great many failures. In England human nature is not greatly different from human nature as found elsewhere, and municipal counsellors are, as a usual thing, demonstrated to be none too well fitted for the conduct of the huge industrial enterprises which many of the municipalities have undertaken. There has been an astonishing increase in municipal indebtedness following in the wake of these industrial undertakings. The municipal expenditures for industrial undertakings have resulted in the raising of the tax rate to such a point as to cause a wholesale exodus of tax-payers from some municipal districts.

The labor vote in England frequently unites solidly in favor of its candidates for municipal office, and sometimes with curious results. Two labor leaders were recently elected to the town council of Battersea, for example, and shortly after their election, having used their political influence to secure jobs as street-sweepers at 27 shillings a week, they resigned their political office.



More or less important as is the socialist movement in those countries already referred to, it is in Germany that we find it developed to a commanding political position. It is, perhaps, hardly fair to call the Social-Democratic party of Germany as it now exists strictly a party of Socialists, for there are many members of it who elsewhere would be known as Liberals. It is true the platform of the Social-Democratic party was originally the communistic manifestos of Carl Marx and Frederick Engels, and at first the party held that the emancipation of labor demanded the transfer of raw material to the common possession of society, and that only the best results and the just distribution of the products of labor could be obtained by the communistic regulation of collective labor. Thirty years ago, under the direction of Liebknecht and Bebel, the party united to itself the labor unions and organizations of various sorts, and became a party of political importance. The growth of the Social Democrats in Germany has been coincident with the growth of industrialism. It is the party of labor and of protest. Its most violent opponents are the agrarians,