65 



Karl Marx has proved the truth of this 

 theory better than anyone else, by the mass of 

 sociological observations which he has taken 

 from the most diverse economic conditions. 



The names, the circumstances, the pheno- 

 mena of conflict can vary with each ofjthe 

 phases of social evolution, but the tragic 

 basis of history always appears in the anta- 

 gonism between those who keep the monopoly 

 of the means of production and they are the 

 minority and those who are dispossessed of 

 them and these are the majority. 



Warriors and shepherds, in primitive societies, 

 as soon as the family, and then the individual 

 appropriation of the land is substituted for 

 primitive collectivism, patricians and plebeians 

 feudatories and vassals nobles and common 

 people bourgeois and proletarians; these are 

 all so many manifestations of the same fact ; 

 the monopoly of wealth on the one side and 

 productive work on the other. 



Now, the great importance of the Marxian 

 law the class struggle consists chiefly in 

 this, that it indicates with great precision of 

 what the vital point of the social question 

 really consists and by what method we can 

 succeed in solving it. 



As long as the economic basis of political, 

 legal, and moral life had not been demon- 

 strated by positive evidence, the aspirations of 

 most men towards a social amelioration were 

 directed vaguely to the demand for, and the 

 partial conquest of, some accessory means, such 

 as freedom of worship, political suffrage, public 

 instruction, etc., and certainly I have no wish 



