Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/812

 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL English yarn but woven at any rate by German hands into a fabric that has practically driven all previous Socialistic stuffs out of the market, and has become the common wear of the revolutionists of aH nations to-day. And it is organised now in Germany itself into the strongest political party Socialism has ever been supported by any where a party showing conspicuous growth from election to election, and polling last year more votes than any other party in the empire. Mr. Dawson has succeeded in giving us in a volume of 300 octavo pages a very full, accurate, and intelligible account of the whole move- ment. His work is evidently the result of thorough study of the subject; he says he has read three hundred books on it, besides parliamentary papers, pamphlets, and articles in periodicals, and he writes throughout in the spirit of the historian, interested but dis- passionate, free at once from the dogmatism and from the sentimentality that often beset different writers on these subjects. His history partakes largely of a biographical character, containing good sketches of all the leading promoters of the movement past and present, and in the centre the great figure of Lassalle, to whom fully a third of the book is rightly devoted on account of his pre-eminence both as founder of the movement and as an extraordinarily brilliant and commanding personality. This is the nost complete and detailed account of Lassalle we have in English. Mr. Dawson's treatment of Marx, on the other hand, is perhaps a little meagre. He gives more space to a man of much inferior importance--Rodbertus whom, however, Mr. Dawson, with many others, greatly over-values, for his work, with all its air of philosophic largeness, is really pretentious and unsubstantial, if we except some of his historical investigations. Mr. Dawson reckons Lassalle much Rodbertus' inferior in political economy, but that is by no means so. Rodbertus was in labour with political economy all his life, but his favourite progeny his rent principle, his wages principle, his normal work day were little better than empty forms. Rodbertus used to tell Lassalle and Rudolph Meyer he could fill them out if he would, but he refused to do so because, forsooth, his correspondents did not know sufficient political economy to understand them. Mr. Dawson gives a very good account of them from which every one may judge of their worth for himself. As to the quarrel between Rodbertus and Marx about the priority of the discovery of the origin of surplus value, Mr. Dawson is right in saying it is of no great moment, for, as a matter of fact, neither the one nor the other had any claim to be the original promulgator of the error. Mr. Dawson, seeing he has given so much space to the point, ought however to have shown that it was taught among the English Socialists many years before either Rodbertus or Marx had written anything at all. Mr. Dawson's work brings the history of the German Socialist movement no further down than 1887, for, though this second edition is just out, it contains no alteration on the previous edition, except She introduction of a single page of preface, stating very briefly