of these groups, in special circumstances. And besides many misconceptions about the importance of state and Parliament will disappear for the social-democracy, when the question has been settled, misconceptions which are found not only within the limits of our party but as well amongst outsiders and which can only be got rid of in this way.

If we have demonstrated above the necessity of elaborating a political system for the social-democracy, chiefly for its value to the party itself, this question has also a larger scope. The fear of middle-class utopianism has until now withheld our best thinkers from exerting themselves in this line. When Kautsky ventured a very modest step in this direction, he only wished to give a scientific completeness to his work. Works like those of Menger and Deslinière could only emphasize the opinion that every effort to give birth at the present time to the political system of the social-democracy, would suffer from the sterility of middle-class utopianism.

This however is not the case. It all depends on the method. If we follow the course, indicated by Menger and seek for the ideas or moral principles of the social-democracy, and if we make a juridical application of these, we remain within the limits of the utopian point of view. But if we appeal to history and consider which social organisation we are facing and what part of the same can be transferred to the regime of the proletariat, if we examine the growth and constitution of these social organs, if we deduct there from the general rules, the result can be very real and without suffering from more fancy, than we witness in every scientific work.

Furthermore at what distance do we suppose the victory of the proletariat over the middle-class to be, if the time has not yet come to state to the world by what means the social-democrats intend to make their victory correspond to their ideals? The Socialists have already admitted the impossibility of establishing the complete socialistic state by any artificial method.

At this moment this party has in some countries millions of partisans, and when everywhere the masses are organising themselves more and more against the existing economical and political system, is it too much to ask the party to do something more than walk about in the dress of the middle-class, patched up with red, and if we want it to show itself in its own garb, and to possess a scheme of political organisation of its own, subject tc discussion?

By what means are the social-democrats to convert the middle-class into their own society? This question must be answered by the political system. We take for granted the economical and industrial action towards socialism. We ask however,

what political superstructure could be solid and elastic enough, so to correspond and to enforce every fresh growth.

When the middle-class fought their own fight, they were able to answer this question. The instructions of the Third Class' representatives contained the political system of this group.. Parliament had been existing for some centuries and, by generalising its character, elaborating its principles, and applying the same, the middle-class have given to themselves and to the world what they wanted.

The proletariat has no more need to mount in the air, to elaborate their political system, than the middle-class had. They develope their own organization due to their rising political power, enforced and developed by the struggle, in the same way that we have seen that the middle class developed their parliamentarism. But it will prove much more difficult to generalize this organisation and to endow it with public authority, to adjust it to the social and political unity, than it was for the political institutions of the middle-class to be developed.

The base for this political system can be no other than an organisation on the base of a community of economic interests, among which the labor-unions occupy the first place. This organisation must needs dispose of a certain public authority, with compelling force over minorities. Above this organisation there must be the organ, expressing the entire interest and desire of the people.

As the prototype of this system we may quote an organization, already known for centuries in the middle-class system of Holland viz. the "waterschap" (polder-system). The landowners in a certain part of the country have one common interest, to protect themselves against the sea and to assure the gauge. This work requires dikes, sluices, ditches, bridges, mills, etc. The minority might by refusing to give their consent, hinder the common establishment, the defrayment and the achievement of these works. But the State has given the right, to the willing majority, under certain conditions concerning the general interest, to compel the minority to join the majority, in order to create the above mentioned works as a public duty. The State delegates a part of its powers to the corporation; in so far as concerns the punishment, police and taxes, necessary to secure the performance of this public function,-the "waterschap" is substituted for the State. And by doing so, there has been made a tie between the special organisation and the general one.

I quote this instance to show that the method, by which the State regularly delegates its power, to maintain a more harmonic unity, is not based merely upon fiction. We witness the same fact in the inner constitution of the several organisations;

the experience acquired by British and German labor-unions provides sufficient material on this point.

I believe I have said enough to prove my point. I should like to call the attention of the International Socialist Bureau and of the Interparliamentary Commission to the necessity and the opportunity for starting the study which needs must precede the framing of a political system. This task is too heavy to be achieved by one single person but if it is desired to entrust one person with this work, he ought to get the co-operation and advice of many. The work in itself must have a collective character. The best thing would be if some prominent members of the party were appointed to take part in this work; amongst them a reporter might be ohosen to frame a general report concerning the results of the committee's proceedings. I think it would be possible to bring the results of this work before the next international congress, by publishing the same in due time.

I expect much from this work for the growth, the unity and the consciousness of the party and for the practical results, to be obtained by the social-democracy of all countries.

Sheveningen, Aug. 5th. 1907.

P. J. TROELSTRA.

Max Stirner: Reincarnated Spook.

"It is the unexpected that always happens" proves true once again. Writing some six months ago I spoke of Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum as a book which has been forgotten amid the growing consciousness of the organic solidarity of society." But soon afterward the irrepressible and talented philosophical Anarchist, Mr. Benjamin R. Tucker, published a brand new English translation of this forgotten work under the title of "The Ego and his Own". The translation has been made with the utmost industry and sympathy by Mr. Stevens T. Byington, and mechanically the book is an excellent specimen of modern book-making.

Mr. Tucker has advertised it widely as "the book that banishes all spooks forever", and Mr. Huneker, one of the cleverest of American journalists, has sought by curiously arranged mosaics of heteogeneous quotations from all sources, ancient and modern, in the Saturday Supplement to the New York Times and in the North American Review, to prove it "the most revolutionary book ever written". This is very amusing to those Socialists who have learned from Plechanoff that what Stirner really did in philosophy was simply to substitute for Feuerbach's spook, Man, that thinnest and most elusive of all spooks, the individual in general, the much vaunted "Ego".

But in these days when the decadent bourgeoisie are raising altars to the mad Polish-German, Friedrich Nietzche, it is just as well that the master-piece of Nietzche has given literary form and charm to the spook philosophy which Stirner first expounded. But Nietzche is on the whole a saner and more optimistic thinker than Stirner for he has his prophetic gaze ever on the future. To him Man, as he is, is never anything but "the bridge to Beyond Man." But Nietzsche is just as unable as was Stirner to see Man or the individual in his dialectic inter-relation to the Cosmos. They both try to banish spooks and end up by worshiping the spookiest of spooks.

George Plechanoff answered the philosophy of Stirner once for all in his most valuable little book, "Anarchism and Socialism" more than a quarter of a century ago, and if further answer were needed Eugene Dietzgen gave it to us two years ago in his paper on Max Stirner and Joseph Dietzgen published in the Philosophical Essays of Joseph Dietzgen.

Marx, Engels, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Max Stirner (Caspar Schmidt), and all the young Hegelians impelled by the re

volutionary dialectic method of Hegel were trying to escape from the sterile idealism of Hegel. Feuerbach may be said to have led the revolt, but he merely apotheosized a new abstraction, Man. Stirner could see this and criticised Feuerbach with great acumen, but proceeded to bow to the altar of his own pet spook, The Ego.

The only way to "banish spooks forever" is to explain their birth and development. The men who did this were Karl Marx and Joseph Dietzgen. We now know that spooks will live just as long as do the economic conditions that breed them, and we smile at the self-appointed spook-banishers, the Don Quixotes of the Twentieth Century.

But the Socialist, who will keep in mind the relationship of Stirner to Hegel and Feuerbach on the one hand and to Marx and Dietzgen on the other, can derive much profit from a thoughtful perusal of "The Ego and His Own." In reading the Communist Manifesto we are too prone to attribute all the truths it contains to the mighty brains of Marx and Engels. It is impossible for anyone to read Stirner without seeing that many of these ideas, such as the class-character of the great French Revolution and the historic role of the bourgeoisie were common to Bruno Bauer, Stirner and the whole Young Hegelian school, and it is in accord with Marxism that this should be so.

The spook of Natural Rights, Rights of Man, &c., has more lives than a cat and keeps reappearing in one form or another. It has crept into the platforms of both our American Socialist parties. It is the product of handicraft industry-the period when a man's property was in fact the fruit of his own industry. As a spook it is made to defend the system under which property is usually the fruit of the industry of the nonpossessors. As Marx put it, "Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers' own labor, the other on the employment of the labor of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only.' Thus the dialectic movement of social development converts this spook, born to defend private property, into its subtlest enemy. But a spook, even though it comes to fight on our side, remains none the less a spook; and Right minus Might is a spook-the purest and most unsubstantial moonshine. To Stirner's everlasting credit, he mercilessly pricked this most beautiful bubble.

Socialists to-day may well ponder such sentences as these: "The Communists affirm that "the earth belongs rightfully to him who tills it, and its products to those who bring them out." I think it belongs to him who knows how to take it, or who does