acknowledge that both factors are present and that they
are made to serve each other.

In what follows, I shall discuss Communism as "A
Promise of a New Order," as "An Interpretation of Life,"
and as "A Revolutionary Method."

MODERM COMMUNISM came into the world as a pro-
phetic movement of protest against the human conse-
quences of mid-nineteenth century capitalism. The
Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels one
hundred years ago, contained most bitter descriptions of
the condition of the laboring class and most confident af-
firmations of the self-destructive nature of the capitalistic
system. It described the process by which the bourgeoisie
were producing their own "grave-diggers" and by which
the revolution was being prepared within the womb of the
old society that was rotten with injustice and unable to
solve its own technical problems. It saw the root of the
evil of society in the private ownership of property and
announced that the theory of the Communists "may be
summed up in a single sentence: abolition of private prop-
erty." It gave a picture of the relationship between social
classes according to which the world was divided into two
classes, with the proletariat on the way to become the
vast majority.

The Manifesto made no allowance for any possibility
of improvement of the condition of the proletariat short of
a complete economic and political revolution. It exag-
gerated the spiritual contrast between the classes as well
as the inevitable increase in economic differences between
them, for it assumed that it was true of the proletarian of
1848 that "law, morality, religion, are to him so many

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