But, it is said, these bourgeois socialists act in this way through love of popularity! This is a strange form of selfishness, at all events, which prefers to the quickly reaped rewards and profits of bourgeois individualism, "the socialist idealism" of popular sympathy, especially when it might gain this sympathy by other means which would compromise it less in the eyes of the class in power.
Let us hope, in concluding, that when the bourgeoisie shall have to surrender the economic power and the political power in order that they may be used for the benefit of all in the new society and that, as Berenini recently said, victors and vanquished may really become brothers without distinction of class in the common assured enjoyment of a mode of life worthy of human beings, let us hope that in surrendering power, the bourgeoisie will do it with that dignity and self-respect which the aristocracy showed when it was stripped of its class privileges by the triumphant bourgeoisie at the time of the French Revolution.
It is the truth of the message of socialism and its perfect agreement with the most certain inductions of experimental science which explain to us not only its tremendous growth and progress, which could not be merely the purely negative effect of a material and moral malady rendered acute by a period of social crisis, but above all it explains to us that unity of intelligent, disciplined, class-conscious solidarity which presents, in the world-wide celebration of the first of May, a moral phenomenon of such grandeur that human history presents no parallel example, if we except the movement of primitive Christianity which had, however, a much more restricted field of action than contemporary socialism.
Henceforth—disregarding the hysterical or unreasoning attempts to revert from bourgeois scepticism to mysticism as a safeguard against the moral and material crisis of the present time, attempts which make us think of those lascivious women who become pious bigots on growing old[86]—henceforth both partisans and adversaries of socialism are forced to recognize the fact that, like Christianity at the dissolution of the Roman world, Socialism constitutes the only force which restores the hope of a better future to the old and disintegrating human society—a hope no longer begotten by a faith inspired by the unreasoning transports of sentiment, but born of rational confidence in the inductions of modern experimental science.
The End.
FOOTNOTES:
[78] J. E. Th. Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of History, London, 1888.
[79] Loria, Les Bases économiques de la constitution sociale, 2nd edition, Paris, 1894. (This work is available in English under the title: "The Economic Foundations of Society." Swan Sonnenschein, London.—Tr.)
To the general idea of Karl Marx, Loria adds a theory about "the occupation of free land," which is the fundamental cause of the technical explanation of the different econo-micro-social organizations, a theory which he has amply demonstrated in his Analisi della proprietà capitalistica, Turin, 1892.
[80] It is seen what our judgment must be regarding the thesis maintained by Ziegler, in his book: La question sociale est une question morale (The social question is a moral question). French trans., Paris, 1894. Just as psychology is an effect of physiology, so the moral phenomena are effects of the economic facts. Such books are only intended, more or less consciously, to divert attention from the vital point of the question, which is that formulated by Karl Marx.