I.

Friends and Fellow-Citizens: The teachings of Social ism contain the material for a new religion which, unlike any other religion, appeals not merely to the heart and emotions, but at the same time to the brain, the organ of knowledge. From all other earthly knowledge socialism is distinguished by its religious form, by its fervid appeal to the heart and soul of man. Generally speaking the object of religion is to save the suffering soul from the gloom and misery of earthly life. This object it has thus far realized only in an unreal and fantastic manner, by referring us to an invisible God and to a Kingdom inhabited by ghosts. The gospel of to-day promises to save us from misery in a real and palpable way. God, that is the Good, the Beautiful and the Holy, is to be made man, and is to descend from heaven unto the earth, not as in the days of old in the flame of religion and in the spell of wonder, but in reason and reality. We want our saviour, our Word, to become flesh, and to be materialized not in one individual only. All of us desire, the people want to become sons of God.

Religion was until now a matter for the dispossessed. Now, however, the matter of the dispossessed is becoming religion, that is something which takes hold of the whole heart and soul of those who believe. The new faith, the faith of the proletariat, revolutionizes every thing, and transforms after the manner of science, the old faiths. In opposition to the olden times we say, Sun, stand thou still, and Earth, move and transform! In the old religion man served the gospel, in the new religion the gospel is to serve man. In order to emancipate humanity from religion not only vaguely but distinctly and really, it is necessary to overcome religion by analyzing and fully comprehending it. The new gospel asks for a thorough revision of the whole system of our thought. According to the old revelation the law was the primary, the supreme and the eternal, and man the secondary element.

According to the new revelation man is the primary, the supreme and the eternal, and the law the secondary, temporary and transitory element.

We do not live for the sake of the law, but, on the contrary, the law exists for our sake, to serve us, and to be modified according to our needs. The old gospel required of us patience and submissiveness ; the new gospel requires of us energy and activity. In the place of grace it puts conscious work. The old bible was named authority and faith; the new has for its title revolutionary science.

Faith and science, my dear friends, form the contradiction which separates the old from the new gospel. Those who have clearly grasped this distinction are incipient socialists, even if they have not penetrated to the political or social consequences springing from it. This distinction between faith and science contains the germ of revolutionary development. Both pursue the same end, the salvation of mankind, yet their ways are as poles asunder. Faith refers us to fancy and imagination, science to reason and reality.

Our opponents, the scribes and pharisees of the old gospel, stand and fall with the dogmas of their faith; they are past redemption. Those, however, who stand on the ground of science, submit their judgment to the crucible of facts ; they are the followers of the new gospel. The struggle between faith and science, the antagonism between the old and the new gospel, dates by no means from the days of socialism. It goes back to the ancient world, to the beginnings of scientific research, then it revives with the renaissance and grows more and more with the approach of the present era where it finds its embodiment in our leaders of scientific thought, though it reaches its full development only in the modern labor movement.

All great movements of the past were but the fore runners, the preliminaries of the general movement, of the coming great revolution whose birth we are witnessing. Greek civilization and Christianity, the Reformation, the French revolution of 1789, philosophy and modern science are mere instruments, but industry is the great architect, and socialism the lofty structure which the nations of our time are rearing. The history of the past has diligently collected the necessary materials, and now, friends, the time has come to dig up the soil and to lay the foundations.

Valuable as the labors of the past may be, they are but fanciful ornaments in comparison with the fundamental work the future has to carry out.

“Man is free, even were he born in chains.” This saying of Schiller needs correction. For man is born in chains and must struggle for freedom. The heaviest chains, the strongest fetters were put on him by Nature. Against her tyranny he struggles from the beginning of his days. Sustenance and apparel he must wrest from her. The whip of dire necessity in her hand she stands over him, and on her whims and frowns his existence depends. It was the tyranny of Nature which gave religion that predominant influence over the soul of man. Religion promised him relief from the heavy hand of Nature. How long and anxiously did Judaism wait for the Kingdom of the Messiah! “Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap ; which neither have storehouse nor barn ; and God feedeth them ; how much are ye better than the fowls?” Praying and fasting are the means recommended by Christianity against the inborn helplessness of man. Through the whole of the middle ages that advice was faithfully acted upon, until its futility became manifest. With the appearance of Luther religious thought changes. He proclaimed that Christ had performed for us in heavenly grace our religious salvation, thus relegating sacred exercises to Sundays chiefly and giving free the week-days for sober work. His challenge to the medieval Church heralds the era of industrial activity. Even though his followers afterwards misrepresented his teachings and though Luther himself left his work but half finished, it is nevertheless true that with the Reformation man starts out on a new earthly practice, the salvation through Labor without exactly giving up his theories about heaven. He works, accumulates wealth, and with the accumulated wealth he rises to the height of a new conception, to the gospel of social salvation.

Religion has since time immemorial been so much cared for and hallowed, that even those minds who have given up the belief in a personal God, in a supreme protector of mankind, still adhere to some sort of religion. Let us for the sake of those conservatives use the old word for the new thing. This is not only a concession made to prejudice in order the more easily to overcome it, but is also justified by the thing itself. Indeed, religions differ not more nor less from each other than all of them from the anti-religious social-democracy. All religions have this in common, that they strive for the salvation of suffering humanity, and to lead it up to the good, the beautiful, the righteous and the divine. Well, social-democracy is all the more the true religion as it strives for the very same end, not in a fantastic way, not by praying and fasting, wishing and sighing, but in a manner positive and active, real and true, by the social organization of manual and mental work.

Work is the name of the new Redeemer.

Christ made a great number of proselytes long before the church was established, so did in many centuries the new redeemer, Work, before he could in our present age think to ascend the throne and to take the sceptre into his hand. Now he is endowed with the attributes of the Godhead, with power and knowledge. He did not come to his glory in an immaculate and miraculous way. He is born in pains, and grown up in struggle and affliction and sorrow. Although it is he who civilizes man and cares for him, and comes with the promise to fully release him from the bonds of slavery, and actually shows him the longed-for new land from afar, yet the crown of thorns is on his brow and the cross of contempt on his shoulders.

However, let us drop parables and allegories, and do away with metaphorical language. The thing is much too great and too prominent to need mystical drapery. We deal here with the salvation of mankind in the truest sense of the word. If there be anything holy, here we stand before the holy of holiest. It is neither a fetish nor an ark of the covenant, neither a tabernacle nor a monstrance. It is the real, positive salvation of the whole civilized humanity. This salvation was neither invented nor revealed, it has grown out of the accumulated labor of history. It consists in the wealth of to day which arose glorious and dazzling in the light of science, out of the darkness of barbarism, out of the oppression, superstition and misery of the people, out of human flesh and blood, to save humanity. This wealth, in all its palpable reality, is the solid foundation of the hope of social-democracy.

The wealth of to-day does not consist in the superb mansions, inhabited by the privileged of society, nor does it consist in their costly apparel, or in the gold and the precious stones of their jewelry, or in the heaps of goods peeping through the show windows of our great cities. All that as well as the coin and bullion in the trunks and safes form but an appendix or, so to speak, the tassels and tufts, behind which the wealth is concealed – the rock on which our hope is built.

What authorizes the people to believe in the salvation from the long ages of torture – nay, not only to believe in, but to see it, and actively to strive for, is the fairy-like productive power, the prodigious fertility of human labor. In the secrets which we have wrung from Nature; in the magic formulas by which we force her to do our wishes and to yield her bounties almost without any painful work on our part; in the constantly increasing improvement of the methods of production – in this I say, consists the wealth which can accomplish what no redeemer ever could.

All exertion and struggle in human history, all aspirations and researches of science find their common aim in freedom of man, in the subjection of Nature under the sway of his mind.

What is freedom? Is it a phantom of which the German poet Schenkendorf sings, “Freedom as I understand it,” and of which, strictly speaking, only the name is known; after which the revolutionists of 1848 were hankering, like a boarding-school miss after some chivalrous knight? And verily, also those have but a philistine conception of its sublime character, who but see in it freedom from police interference or freedom of competition, of conscience, of speech, of organization and of public meetings. All that is but the fringe of freedom. Our Liberals and Progressives, who only fight for that tinsel, have long ago deprived the people of all reality of freedom which they consider as their exclusive privilege. What we want and what the Liberals largely possess in superabundance is freedom from the bonds of slave-labor, freedom from poverty, misery and sorrow, freedom from starvation and ignorance, freedom from the curse of being the beast of burden to the “higher classes” – this freedom for the masses of toiling humanity is the sacred aim which modern society could attain to by the infinite productivity of human labor.

Man, to be sure, is still dependent on Nature. Her tribulations are not as yet all overcome. Culture has yet a good deal to do; aye, its work is endless. But we have so far mastered the dragon, that we finally succeeded in forging the weapon with which it can be subdued; we know now the way to tame the beast into a useful domestic animal. From praying and fasting we have turned to thinking and working. The result of the change of method is plainly visible in the conquests of modern industry, whose soul is the productivity of our labor.

The hardships of mankind were perhaps until now inevitable, considering that there was no power to mitigate them. It certainly required thousands of years of development to bring forth that power. As long as the labor of the people was not fruitful enough to satisfy the needs of the masses, certain classes could usurp the privilege of governing the land. I am even inclined to go further and to admit that the task of developing our labor power to that degree of prodigious fertility which we see to-day, has necessitated a privileged governing class as well as the exploitation of the masses. I am thus ready to acquiesce patiently in the misery of the past, and bear it no grudge or malice. But all the more I am now justified in pressing forward the claims of social-democracy. The people are striving for real salvation, because the conditions are ready for it. Poverty, starvation and misery in the past were quite often the inevitable results of the deficiency of production. Now, or to be more accurate, since the second decade of the nineteenth century the case is quite the reverse : it is the superfluity of wealth, as manifested in the recurring periods of commercial and industrial depression, which interferes with production. However full the granaries and warehouses may be with goods of all kind, the people starve and freeze, because the possessing classes, satiated with wealth, do not require their labor power. The world is over-populated (hear! hear!), say our professors and politicians. Yes, the world is over-populated, because the means of sustenance can be so easily gotten. Human history had until now the task to organize production, to unfold labor power, to economize, and to produce wealth. To achieve that purpose, civilization used man ruthlessly as a tool. As far as that task can be fulfilled by means of oppression, it has been fulfilled. Civilization was until now the aim, and man the means of history. The time has now come to revert the case and to make man the end, and civilization the means. The prime necessity to an advance in civilization is freedom of the people to participate in consumption. Only occasionally and exceptionally there is suffering from a lack of supply, but generally and as a rule we witness misery caused by an abundance of goods in quest of consumers. Owing to free competition this abundance, called national wealth, has been the means to reduce prices and thus to stimulate advanced methods of production by the introduction of labor and cost-saving machinery. How ever, in consequence thereof those who were unable to compete went to the wall and the purchasing power of society decreased. So it came about that wealth, once the stimulator of progress, is now turning into a factor of historical stagnation.

Some of you, dear friends, may think that I see some thing which is not warranted by fact. However great wealth might be, it was by no means so abundant as to stifle production and to deprive the laborer of his employment.

To be sure, new factories are being built and the old ones prosper ; new railways, shipping lines and canals are being opened, and the land does not go out of cultivation. Yet all this is but the appearance, and not the reality of things, because truth is veiled by seeming contradictions. He who has eyes to see, sees the general tendency, despite the particular contradiction he sees the superfluity and the retrenchment of industry, despite the fact that the chimneys continue to pour forth smoke. What does not move as rhythmically as its nature requires, is lame. And who could deny that there is both the need and the power to expand production to many times its present dimensions? No matter how great or small the present improvements of agriculture or of machinery may be, on the whole it must be admitted that the growth of production is kept in check by the question of consumption. The salvation of humanity is involved in this question. It is so great and sublime, that all other problems which time may bear in its folds must wait in silence. The whole of old Europe is waiting with bated breath for the fulfilling of things which are coming.

The political events are but the surface, but a ripple of what is raging in the depths of history, at the bottom of social life. He who has eyes to see, sees how every rising tide of freedom has in the last decades been thrown back by an ebb twice as strong. In all leading countries of Europe every political step forward is followed by a forcible reaction. The tri-colored freedom alternates with Caesarism, Republics with Empires, lively enthusiasm with flabby apathy, each new era of liberalism is followed by a Bismarck. The English Parliament disestablishes the Irish Church and carries Crimes Acts which exceed in severity Prussian martial law. France, in the person of M. Ollivier, shows a strange attitude. Standing fast on one leg, she moves the other forward and backward, as if working the spinning-wheel of time. The wheel is diligently kept in motion, but no yarn comes out of it. Neither in Paris, nor in London, neither in Madrid nor in Naples, neither in Berlin nor in Vienna. O, ye short-sighted and narrow-minded, who cannot give up the fad of the moderate organic progress! Don’t you perceive that all your great liberal passions sink to the level of mere trifling, because the great question of social salvation is on the order of the day? Don t you perceive that struggle and destruction must precede peace and construction, and that chaotic accumulation of material is the necessary condition of systematic organization just as the calm precedes the tempest and the latter the general purification of the air? Neither the emancipation of nationalities nor that of women, neither the reorganization of school nor that of education in general, neither the reduction of standing armies nor that of taxation – neither of those demands can be satisfactorily taken in hand before the working class is freed from the fetters which keep them riveted to starvation, sorrow and misery. History stands still, be cause she gathers force for a great catastrophe.

Social-democracy believes in the conquering power of truth, hopes for the salvation from material and mental slavery, and deeply desires justice for all.

The practical and the successful, the pharisees and the scribes, the selfish and the hypocrites think us there fore hopelessly fantastic. They argue that there have always been lucky and unlucky, rich and poor, master and servants, and they illogically conclude that this state of things will endure forever and ever. They don’t conceive the possibility of salvation, because they don’t understand the people. The people are not a mass of pleasure-seeking loafers. They despise the finery of your pseudo-culture. They desire a systematic organization of our economic life which shall make impossible the gluttony of the few and the privations of the many, but which shall secure plenty of the necessaries for all. Our kingdom differs toto coelo from yours. And your kingdom, the social order of to-day, have you constructed it consciously, or is it not true that you have organized it instinctively, experimentally, in the course of centuries? Consider the frugal needs of our people and at the same time the modern fertility of labor, and ask yourselves if the instinct alone would not be sufficient to teach us how to supply adequately our needs with the help of the existing means of production? However, social-democracy does not rely on instinctive feeling only. In contradistinction to the present system of production which works without clear purpose and measure, social-democracy is based on a clear comprehension of the scope and the tendencies and the aims of modern economic life according to which it consciously attempts to reconstruct human society.

Conscious, systematic organisation of social labor is the redeemer of modern times.