1 62 



Not less strange for a scientist is the artificial reason- 

 ing which permits M. Garofalo to maintain in Chapter II. 

 that socialists have no logic, because if the passage to 

 collectivism is determined by the progressive accumula- 

 tion of wealth in a small number of hands, " they ought 

 then to favour this accumulation." As if the social 

 evolution were not itself a natural evolution, and, there- 

 fore superior to the freewill of individuals and parties. 



But therein precisely consists the force of the scientific 

 socialism of Marx and Engels. It has transported into 

 the field of political economy the idea and the positive 

 sense of an historic and natural evolution, and confines 

 itself to stating an order of succession in social forms just 

 as Darwinian biology only states an order of succession 

 in organic forms. 



But contemporary socialism, just because it is in com- 

 plete agreement with scientific and positive thought, has 

 no more of the illusions of those who imagine that to- 

 morrow with a dictator " of prodigious intelligence and 

 remarkable eloquence," charged with organising collec- 

 tivism by way of decrees and rules one could leap the 

 intermediate phases. Besides, has not individualism, 

 absolute and unbounded, been already transformed into 

 a limited individualism and a partial collectivism by the 

 legal limitations of the jus abutendi and by the continued 

 transformation into social function or public ownership 

 of services (lighting, drinking water, transport) or pro- 

 perties (roads, bridges, canals) which formerly were 

 private services and properties. These intermediate 

 phases cannot be suppressed by decree, but they develop 

 and exhaust themselves naturally and daily under the 

 pressure of economic and social conditions ; but by 

 natural, and therefore inexorable, process, they always 

 approach nearer to the ulterior phase of the absolute 

 collectivism of the means of production, which the 

 socialists have not invented, but which they only assert 

 and whose course they foresee positively, which they can 

 accelerate by giving to the proletarians, formed into a 

 c'ass party, a clearer consciousness of their historic rdle. 



To his psychological errors M. Garofalo has added such 

 a grave biological error that it allows me to suppose 

 that in his anti-socialist fury he has been struck with a 

 passing scientific loss of memory. 



On page 231 he writes : "For socialists the inequality 

 of economic conditions, which does not always permit 

 the most deserving to be sufficiently esteemed and re- 

 warded, is the great social injustice that it is necessary 



