7 2 



We must attain to the abolition ol private 

 property and to the establishment of collec- 

 tive and social property in the land and the 

 means of production. This substitution 

 cannot be the subject of a decree as people 

 suppose us to intend ; but it is being accom- 

 plished under our eyes each day, from hour to 

 hour, directly or indirectly. 



Directly because civilisation shows us the 

 continuous substitution of social possessions 

 and functions for individual possessions and 

 functions. Roads, the Post Office, railways, 

 museums, the lighting of towns, drinking 

 water, instruction, etc., which were only a few 

 years ago private possessions and functions, 

 have become social possessions and functions, 

 and it would be absurd to imagine that this 

 direct advance of socialism ought to stop 

 short to-day instead of progressively empha- 

 sising itself, since everything in modern life 

 moves with accelerating speed. 



Indirectly because it is the point to which 

 economic and bourgeois individualism tends. 

 The bourgeoisie, which borrows its name 

 from the inhabitants of the boroughs which 

 the feudal castle and the churches protected 



farming represents the petty agricultural industry, and 

 that it cannot struggle against the big agricultural indus- 

 try well furnished with machines, just as handwork has 

 not been able to resist the great manufacturing industries. 

 It is true that there are still to-day handicrafts in a few 

 villages, but these are rudimentary organs which only 

 represent a former phase, and which have no decisive 

 function in the economic world. They are like the rudi- 

 mentary organs of the higher animals, according to the 

 theory of Darwin witnesses to epochs for ever passed. 



The same Darwinian and economic law applies to 

 small farming, itself evidently destined for the same end 

 as handicrafts. 



