The recent literature of syndicalism is very extensive. We have already mentioned M. Guy Grand’s La Philosophie Syndicaliste.
[1026] Réflexions sur la Violence, p. xxxv. We must note, however, that M. Sorel protests against any confusion being made between the myth as he understands it and Utopian socialism. The myth is obviously superior in the fact that it cannot be refuted, seeing that it is merely the expression of a conviction. See pp. xxv and 218 of the same work.
[1027] We need only recall the doctrine of usury and the legislation on the question—all of it the outcome of Canonist teaching.
[1028] A Catholic professor—long since forgotten—of the name of de Coux wrote as follows in a book entitled Essai d’Economie politique, published in 1832: “The practical application of Catholicism would result in the finest system of social economy that the world has ever seen.”
[1029] “Catholicism alone has the necessary cohesion and power to withstand socialism, which has been erected upon the ruins of the Liberal system.” (Comte de Mun, La Question sociale au XIXe Siècle, 1900.)
“There is no need to think of the Church as a kind of gendarme in cassock flinging itself against the people in the interest of capital. Rather it should be understood that it is working in the interests and solely for the defence of the weak.” (Comte de Mun, Discours, April 1893.)
[1030] The Social Christians somewhere make the remark that even if the orthodox account of creation is destined to disappear before the onslaughts of the evolutionary theory and Adam makes way for the gorilla, the problem would merely be intensified, for it would still be necessary to get rid of the “old man.” “We live,” says Brunetière, “in the strength of the victories won over the more primitive instincts of our nature” (Revue des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1895).
Kidd in his Social Evolution, a work which attracted great attention when it was first published in 1894, attempts to apply the Darwinian theory to Christianity. He accepts the Darwinian hypothesis that the struggle for existence and natural selection constitute the mainsprings of progress. But the struggle may demand, or the selection involve, the sacrifice of individual to collective interest, and the only force which can inspire such sacrifice is religion.
[1031] It was no Christian Socialist, but Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, who wrote: “The original equality of men is not a doctrine founded simply upon the observation of social facts. It was only clearly affirmed for the first time by Christianity.” (Traité de Politique, vol. i, p. 407.)
[1032] Frédéric Le Play (1806-82) was a mining engineer, and was educated at the École Polytechnique. He subsequently became a professor at the École des Mines and a Counseiller d’État. In 1855 he published a collection of monographs dealing with working-class families under the title of Les Ouvriers européens, in one volume (the second edition, which appeared in 1877, consisted of six volumes). In 1864 he published an exposition of his social creed in La Réforme sociale, a book that Montalembert declared to be “the most original, the most courageous, the most useful, and altogether the most powerful book of the century.” It hardly deserves such extravagant praise, perhaps, but it is true that many of its more pessimistic prophecies concerning the future of France have been very curiously verified.