and history in their university; they are more than willing to see Welsh taught in the schools of the Welsh-speaking areas, with the consent and approval of parents; they are fully alive to the necessity of having a certain proportion of bilingual teachers and officials in all such areas. Few of us indeed can refrain from a feeling of sentimental regret on reading the ominous statistics concerning the rapid decline of Welsh in the three north-western counties, the ancient principality of Gwynedd, which has hitherto been reckoned the impregnable citadel of the Welsh language. The encroaching English tide is evidently flowing fast in North Wales. The penetration of the motor-car, the influx of English residents, and the reading of English newspapers during the war, may to some extent have helped to produce this speedy transformation. But its main cause has been the keen determination of the local inhabitants themselves to acquire English speech and culture, and thereby to emerge into a wider atmosphere of thought, knowledge and experience. No true Welsh citizen wishes to see the extinction of the old British tongue in Wales; but most of us would rather see it perish outright than be turned into a legal instrument of tyranny and reaction. HERBERT M. VAUGHAN VOL. 247. R NO. 504. SOME COMMUNIST EXPERIMENTS OF THE I. 2. 3. Essai sur la Vie et les Ecrits de Melchior Hoffmann. By G. HERMANN. Der Anabaptismus in Tirol. By BECK and LOSERTH. Archiv für Communism in Central Europe in the time of the Reformation. By 1897. 4. John of Leiden (1903); Bernhard Rothmann (1904). By H. DETmer. 5. Der Kommunismus der Wiedertäufer in Münster und seine Quellen. By H. VON SCHUBERT. 1919. 6. Kommunismus in Reformationszeitalter. Humanisten, Reformatoren, Wiedertaufer. By H. SCHÖNEBAUM. 1919. OMMUNIST theories are as old as human speculation. As COMM soon as men begin, however dimly, to reason of righteousness and temperance and judgment they become aware of the need to discover some justification for inequalities of rank and possessions.) Above all, in times of great intellectual activity, of economic unrest and of religious revival, the need for such a justification is felt the more insistently; it is then especially that men, who have found themselves unable to accept the social conditions of their day, have been led to advance theories of communism and to attempt to translate them into practice. The sixteenth century was such a period, and it is the object of this article to point to a succession of communist experiments which embarrassed the authorities and threatened, at times seriously, to endanger the established order. The communist movement in the sixteenth century was, for the most part, confined to Central Europe. Starting in Switzerland it ramified east through the Tyrol and Bohemia into Moravia, and north through the Rhineland into Germany and the Low Countries. It was virtually co-extensive with the sphere of the Lutheran and Zwinglian reforming movements. Communism finds no place in the history of Calvinism. Calvin's opponents, the Libertines, held some singular opinions; but they cannot properly be described as communists. Nor did it play any part in the organization of the French Huguenots. Their enemies accuse them of almost every unsocial doctrine, but never suggest that they are communists. In the sixteenth century all the factors which condition a recrudescence of communism were present in abundance. The Humanists, painfully conscious of the contrast presented by the luxury of the rich and the misery of the poor, attacked not only the corruption of the time but also the whole economic system which they held to be the cause of that corruption. Erasmus, Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hutten agree in throwing the blame upon the economic system of the Middle Ages. Erasmus complains that all sense of justice and of brotherly love has been lost. The vow of poverty is, he maintains, not simply the obligation of the religious orders but of all Christian people. This, it is true, remained with him an ideal; his strong practical sense would never have allowed him to accept communism. But he saw clearly that the rapid increase in wealth had brought with it a moral and spiritual degeneration, and that any true reformation must lie in a return to a simpler manner of life. More was influenced by the same considerations. His Utopia is no mere intellectual conception; it is based upon a careful diagnosis of the economic condition of Tudor England, which he held responsible for the evils for which he could see no remedy, save in a limitation of property. Erasmus called his friend More a new Democritus, and indeed the ethic of the Utopia is Epicurean rather than Platonist. More would have all men work. But they" are not to be wearied from early in the morning till late in the evening like labouring and striving beasts." The hours of labour are to be short, and there is to be ample time for recreation. "Felicity " he holds to be the supreme good; but this could only be realised under a régime in which all men live in common, and in which silver and gold are held to be of no account. Nothing, he tells us, more commended the gospel to the Utopians than when they heard" that Christ instituted all things in common and that the same communitie doth yet remaine among the rightest Christian companies." More's views are of great interest as an indication of the attitude of one of the best minds of the Renaissance towards the problem of social reconstruction. Nor were they unknown to Continental Humanist circles, for upon the recommendation of Erasmus two Latin editions of the Utopia were published by Fræben at Basle, with a prefatory letter by Erasmus himself. Sebastian Franck approached the same problems from a different angle. The evils of the time had arisen because men were no longer true Christians. We should share in all things as we share in the light of the sun, for property " has an evil sound in our ears" and "it is written in the heart by the finger of God that all things are common and undivided." Nevertheless, Franck does not advocate the abolition of property: his communism seems limited to the idea that in a truly Christian Church there should be some provision for correcting the inequalities of wealth. In his "Paradoxa " he argues indeed that absolute communism is unchristian, as it would remove the impulse to charity and benevolence. His teaching, with its high ethical content and its entire absence of fanaticism, is derived from the earlier German mystics, who were not without their influence in preparing the religious background of sixteenth century communism. So Tauler teaches that God, the commune esse, is all; man is nothing. The assertion of the will is the root of all evil, and was the cause of Satan's fall from heaven. "Sein 'ich' und sein' mich' sein 'mir' und sein mein' das war sein Abkehr und sein Fall." Even so he concludes it is now. The Deutsche Theologia carries the same conception a stage further; just as we have no will of our own, neither have we any possessions. "Wär nicht eigen Will, so wär auch kein Eigenschaft.” The social conditions which so troubled the Humanists were the result of a gradual weakening of the economic structure of feudalism and of the rise of a new capitalist industrialism. The masses, crushed between the upper and the nether mill-stone of feudal and religious extortion, formed a semi-articulate body, acutely disaffected and disposed to listen to any doctrine which offered a hope of improving their conditions. The effect of the teaching of the reformers upon such material is easily intelligible. For the authority of the Catholic Church was substituted the newly translated Bible, but as the Bible contains elements which, if given a certain turn, become highly anarchical, it is not surprising that its teaching worked powerfuily upon the popular imagination. Men saw their overlords assailed in the prophecies of Ezekiel and Hosea. In the New Testament they discovered a gospel which made all Christians a brotherhood and all men equal in the sight of God. Not that Zwingli and Luther had the least sympathy with communism. Both early saw that their 0 t 0 doctrines could only be established with the aid of the civil power. But each had to contend against a powerful opposition within his own ranks. The history of Christianity, as Troeltsch has shown, reveals a continual struggle between the Church and the Sect types. The former attempts to accommodate the teaching of Christ to the needs of every-day life; the latter insists that Christian life involves separation from the world. The Catholic Church had sought to control this separatist tendency through the religious orders which provided for a life of higher devotion. Yet it had continually to combat organizations which claimed to interpret the Christian life in their own way, and often without regard to the authority of the Church. In the Reformation the same tendency early revealed itself in the Anabaptist movement. Anabaptism is simply a general name which covers those heterogeneous sectarian tendencies which were sporadic in the Middle Ages. Bullinger enumerates twelve sub-divisions of the sect, and the number might have been extended indefinitely. It included many men of piety and ability who were dissatisfied with the theology of the reformers. Regarding as ethically defective the doctrine of justification by faith, their starting-point was rather the "inner light" of conscience through which alone the truth of Scripture can be discerned. As this light was, they held, in all men, it lay in the power of all to win salvation. Thus they took their stand upon adult baptism, partly as an assertion of the principle of free-will, and partly as the badge of their fellowship. For Anabaptism strongly emphasised the conception of brotherhood. It was the religion of the common man " and it urged the need for a return to primitive Christianity. Hence among its fundamental doctrines it set the community of goods. Anabaptist communism must however be distinguished from the collateral communist movement, which originated in 1521 with the Zwickau prophets, and which culminated under Thomas Münzer in the Peasants' Revolt. Münzer, who had been ejected from Prague for proclaiming communism, gave himself out to be the successor of Ziska-the leader of the militant Hussites. His communism was however political and revolutionary rather than religious, and the early Anabaptists disclaimed all connection with him. The Anabaptist movement originated with the "Spirituals of Zurich. Their leaders, Manz and Grebel, would have the |