u6 



It would have been similar if, before the 

 French Revolution which brought about 

 the birth of the bourgeois world prepared 

 and ripened in a prior evolution the nobility 

 and the clergy, the classes then in power, had 

 asked the representatives of the Third 

 Estate bourgeois by birth, aristocrats or 

 priests having embraced the cause of the 

 bourgeoisie against the privileges of their 

 caste, like the Marquis de Mirabeau and the 

 Abbe Sieves : " But what will your new 

 world be ? Present us first with an exact 

 plan of it ; then we will decide." 



The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, could 

 not have answered, because it could not have 

 foreseen what human society would become 

 in the nineteenth century : and that did not 

 prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking 

 place, because it represented the subsequent 

 phase, natural and inevitable, of an eternal 

 evolution. That is now the position of 

 socialism in the face of the bourgeois world. 

 And if this bourgeois world, only born a 

 century ago, is to have an historical cycle 

 much smaller than the feudal world (aristo- 

 cratic and clerical), it is simply because the 

 marvellous scientific progress of the nineteenth 

 century has multiplied a hundredfold the 

 rapidity of life in time and space, and because 

 civilised humanity traverses now in ten years 

 the same road that it took a century or two 

 to travel in the Middle Ages. 



The continually accelerated march of human 

 evolution is, again, one of the laws established 

 and confirmed by positive social science. 



