i6 4 



men's Party is to get possession of power, not in the 

 interest of all, but to expropriate the. governing class and 

 substitute themselves for it. They make no mystery, 

 moreover, about it." This assertion is found again tan 

 page 210, etc. 



Now, it is sufficient to have read the programmes of 

 the socialist party from the Manifesto of Marx and Engels 

 to the propaganda publications, to know, on the contrary, 

 that contemporary socialism wishes, and declares that it 

 wishes, to arrive at the general suppression of every 

 division of the social classes by putting an end to the 

 division of the social inheritance of production, and, 

 therefore, proclaims that it is resolved to realise the well- 

 being of all, and not only as a few short-sighted people 

 continue to believe the well-being of a fourth estate, 

 which will only have to continue the egoistical example 

 of the third estate. 



Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism that 

 every individual, except a child, a sick man, an invalid, 

 ought to work in order to live, whatever may be the 

 useful work that he accomplishes, this inevitable conse- 

 quence follows, that in a society ordered on this prin- 

 ciple every class antagonism will become impossible, for 

 this antagonism only exists when the society includes a 

 large majority who work for a miserable livelihood, and 

 a small minority who live well without working at all. 



This initial error naturally dominates the whole scheme 

 of the book. It is thus, for example, that Chapter III. 

 is devoted to proving that the "social revolution prepared 

 by the new socialists will be the destruction of all moral 

 order in society because it is lacking in an ideal which 

 can be a luminous standard for it " (page 159). 



Let us leave on one side, my dear Baron, the famous 

 "moral order" of the society which decorates the gloved 

 and eminent thieves of great and little Panamas, of 

 banks and railroads, and which condemns to imprison- 

 ment the children and women who steal dry wood or 

 grass from the fields which formerly belonged to the 

 community ! 



But to say that socialism is wanting in an ideal, when 

 even its opponents recognise it to possess the immense 

 superiority and power of opposing to the earthly scepti- 

 cism of the present world an ardent faith in a better 

 social justice for all, and of presenting thereby such a 

 resemblance to primitive and regenerating Christianity 

 (very different from its fatty degeneracy called Catholi- 

 cism) to say this is for a scientist to put himself into 

 blind rebellion against the most evident reality of daily 

 fact. 



But the fundamental equivocation from which so many 

 thinkers M. Garofalo included among them cannot free 



