Socialism is still coloured to its detriment by excessive loyalty to Marx, and the views of Marx were shaped by a time which has passed away. In the early forties, when the system of Marx was taking form, idealism had declined, and a very crude dogmatic materialism was in the ascendant. The very active speculation which had previously been directed to the ideal, attempted to work in the real and material without due preparation on a very inadequate basis of facts—with strange results! A fierce militant revolutionary spirit, which in the circumstances must be regarded as very natural, was preparing for the troubles of 1848. Ricardo, a man singularly deficient in the requisite historical and philosophical training, was the reigning power in economic theory. Under such influences the views of Marx were prematurely shaped into the dogmatic system which we know. He continued to hold and develop them without any real attempt at self-criticism in riper years, and he, an exile living in England, forcibly urged them from his study on the socialist groups and parties of the Continent. In his manifesto of the Communist party, Marx declares that the proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. It has been the unfortunate destiny of him and his school to forge new chains for the working class in the shape of dogmatic materialism, a rigid and abstract collectivism, and ultra-revolutionary views, which still hamper it in the task of emancipation. The promptitude with which the emancipators of the human race have provided new chains is strange enough. Still stranger is the readiness men have shown in putting them on! As we have seen in a previous chapter, the followers of Marx have gone further in this way than their chief.[3] An ill service was done to the working class by utterances on marriage and the family, which gave the ruling classes who keep the workers out of their rights the plea that they were maintaining the fundamental principles of social order. The abstract collectivism which is the prominent economic feature of his school suggests two serious doubts: if by a revolutionary act they took the delicate and complex social mechanism to pieces, whether they would be able to put it together again; and if they did succeed in putting it together, whether it would work. The same devotion to abstract collectivism has made his followers unable to draw up a reasonable agrarian policy suitable to the peasantry. Their hostility to religion, expressed most freely in the early years of the agitation in Germany and elsewhere, has been a serious hindrance to their progress, both among Catholics and Protestants, especially the former.