is because he is the victim of a passing 

 emotion or of an ill-balanced temperament. 

 He can consequently be easily excused. 



What provokes a smile of pity is to see 

 certain conservatives, "young in years but 

 old in thought " for conservatism with the 

 young can only be the effect of egoistic 

 calculation or the sign of physical anaemia 

 to see them wear an air of self -sufficiency or 

 of pity for socialists, whom they consider at 

 the best as " led astray," without perceiving 

 that what is normal is for old people to be 

 conservatives, but that young conservatives 

 can only be egoists who fear to lose the lazy 

 ease in which they were born or the 

 advantages of the established method of 

 "raking in the spoils." If their brains 

 are not poor, at least their hearts are. The 

 socialist, who has everything to lose and 

 nothing to gain in loudly affirming his point 

 of view, can oppose all the superiority of a 

 disinterested altruism, especially when, born 

 in the aristocratic or bourgeois class, he has 

 renounced the brilliant pleasures of a lazy 

 life to defend the cause of the feeble and the 

 oppressed. 



But, they say, these bourgeois socialists act 

 in this way for. the love of popularity. A 

 strange egoism in every case which prefers 

 to the bourgeois individualism of honours and 

 rapid gains, "the socialist idealism" of popu- 

 lar sympathy, even when this sympathy could 

 be gained by other means which would com- 

 promise a man less with the class in power ! 



Let us hope, finally, that when the 



