The socialist idea, in its logical march irresistible as fate, had reached its inevitable goal. It began by deciding to reform, then it said, “I will transform,” and finally it announced boldly, “I will destroy, shatter, and demolish.” The beginning was reform with its alluring utopias of social unity and harmony; the middle stage was transformation, with specious promises of improvement and hopes of a renewed social youth; the ending is destruction, with open threats of anarchy and social annihilation. It is impossible to cherish illusions any longer on this subject: the reformers glided into transformers and the transformers coolly turned destroyers, not in haste and passion, but in cold blood, theoretically, we might almost say dogmatically; for radical destruction, or the uprooting of the existing social order, is the foremost doctrine of the syllabus of the socialist idea, which is itself the most perfect outcome of the revolutionary idea.
Living socialism—that is, socialism personified in its real representatives—no longer makes any mystery as to this, and cannot pretend to feel itself injured or calumniated if we reproduce and lay bare its own formulas. It is its own voice that cries aloud over the world: “Society as it is must perish, and from its ruins a new social system shall and must spring forth.” The first prophets and teachers of the socialist idea had hoped that the idea in itself, and for its own sake, would be accepted at once, and that humanity would spontaneously open its heart to it, as it does its eyes to the rays of the sun. The disciples have far outrun the programme of their masters; they no longer mention the ideal revolution, and if the ideal alone, preached by word of mouth, should not be strong enough to fulfil the programme at any given time, they mean to back it with the strong hand, and force it by violence to become a fact and hasten towards its definitive triumph. Social destruction is at present the latest phase of the socialist idea, which boldly comes forward, programme in hand, and bids us accept it and help to build up its rule as an inevitable necessity. It summons living society publicly and contemptuously to its bar, and bids it be ready to be demolished and afterwards re-established according to the fancy of this evil spirit, powerful indeed to destroy, but helpless to create.
Thus it is that this doctrine—if it can be called a doctrine—so philanthropic at the outset, so peaceful, so brotherly; this doctrine, which announced itself as a new gospel of peace, freedom, and brotherhood, has come to speak sternly of war, of massacre, of destruction; has sworn that no matter what opposition it raises and what blood it costs, the socialist idea shall triumph, and has decided that if it be necessary to reach the throne at which it aims over ruins and over corpses, it will stride over ruins and over corpses! Let the human sacrifices seal, if need be, the bloody covenant of the new social order.
It will scarcely be believed that this work of social destruction has been compared to the work of Christ, the reformer and transformer of society. It is so, however; and this new era which is before us has actually been likened to the social transformation, or rather restoration, achieved by Christianity—as if anything could be more flagrantly antagonistic to the great transformation worked by the Christian idea than this pretended transformation dreamed of and sung by the prophets of the socialist idea; as if a revolution brought about by force and violence could ever be compared to a restoration accomplished through love and self-sacrifice!
You reformers and innovators, do you forget that Jesus Christ attacked nothing by force and destroyed nothing by violence; that in his divine wisdom he was content to sow truth in men’s souls and love in their hearts as the husbandman casts seed into the furrow; and that truth and love have done their work among humankind as germs in the earth, as the blood in our veins, as electricity throughout nature—that is, in mysterious silence, with a strength full of gentleness and patience, yet with unerring certainty? You forget that if Christ cursed the unjust rich man—that is, wealth abusing its privileges, wealth without love, compassion, or sympathy for others—yet he never dreamt of leading the poor against the rich, but simply placed between the two the powerful but sweet link of charity. You forget that if he delivered captives from their bonds and slaves from their chains, he never incited master or slave to wage fratricidal war on each other, and that it was only as his teaching sank into the heart of the master that the fetters of the slave set free through love dropped of themselves, as ripe fruit drops from the tree in its good time and season. You forget that if the divine Reformer came to found a new society, it was by a new creation, and not through destruction; that he came to rehabilitate even bodily society while he created the true kingdom of souls; and that, far from breathing into it the spirit of social hatred and jealousy, he came to restore, or rather found within it, the rule of love and social self-denial. The very goal which the socialist idea has reached by identifying itself with the idea of social destruction is itself the best proof of the irreconcilable antagonism between socialism and Christianity.
I do not say that each individual in the ranks of contemporary socialism defines and adopts this programme of destruction so clearly and so resolutely as I have stated. Under all standards there are many men who neither see nor understand where the chiefs whose orders they obey are leading them—honest, upright men, duped by villains; passionate lovers of good, while strayed and lost in the great army of evil. I fully admit these exceptions, possible, nay, probable, everywhere; and, indeed, why deny their existence? Nevertheless, the mainspring of socialist action in our day lies in the idea of destruction, and the problem which contemporary socialism no longer seeks to veil is simply this: “What are the speediest means for completely demolishing the old structure of society, which is already bursting asunder in all its parts; and when down, what is to be done to rebuild from its ruins the edifice of the new social order?” Yes, such is the problem whose solution socialism boasts of finding, even though it be through rivers of blood and mountains of corpses; and yet this social body, rotten as it is said to be, still rests on strong foundations as old as humanity itself.
Property is its material foundation, the family its human foundation, and religion its divine foundation; and therefore the logical march of the socialist idea drives it, like fate, to clamor not only for the reform and transformation but for the ruin and destruction of these three things on which rests the whole of society, religion, family, and property. I do not hesitate to declare it, in spite of the vehement denials of men still unaccountably blinded to facts: the real scope of the socialist idea when pursued to its logical conclusion is the radical transformation or the utter uprooting of these stable and ancient institutions, as old as human society itself—property, family, and religion—and thereby the fall of our whole social system, as of a building on its shattered foundations and its broken supports. There are many theoretical socialists who do not dare to exhibit their theory in terms whose brutality seems to exceed even the grotesqueness of the idea they embody, and many who still cling to a few illusions and have a regard for decency. Such as these protest against what they call our calumnies and exaggerations. Destroy? they exclaim; we do not wish to destroy, we only long to transform. There was a time when, with mistaken faith in the honesty of purpose I loved to find or imagine everywhere, I, and you perchance, were deceived by this specious excuse, these alluring formulas; but to-day it is impossible to mistake the sense of this former mystery; it has too disastrously been revealed to us.
The socialist idea directly attacks the principle of property—that is, individual possession of one’s fields, house, capital, or patrimony, so happily called the domain; property—that is, in the common order of things, the fruit of individual labor or of the labor and self-denial of one’s forefathers; property—that is, the pledge of man’s independence, and the sign of his kingship in his own home, small as it may be; property, which in all nations and ages has been sheltered under the triple shield of nature, justice, and religion; property, the material basis of society—indeed, its necessary condition and the link by which the family is bound to its native soil as the tree by its roots; property, always and everywhere looked upon as sacred and inviolable among nations who have claimed the honors of civilization; property, which all societies have acknowledged even while appearing to deny its rights, violating them by force; property, in a word, which is a thing so familiar to us that the least infraction of its laws would cause us a remorse only to be allayed by reparation. Such is the nature of property; and shall we believe the teaching of this new jurisprudence, the propagators of these new laws, who maintain that there is no question of destroying but only of reforming, or at most transforming, the nature of property?
In what does this miraculous, proposed transformation consist? The expedient is very simple—namely, to strip the mass of owners in order to constitute one sole and supreme owner; for it is obvious, after all, that some one must still possess the earth. This legal spoliation, no doubt, will be a work of time, but it will be sure. And who is the new owner to be, in whom the right of universal property shall be vested, and on whose shoulders will be flung the burden of universal wealth? The state, forsooth; the god-state, the “state” which may be an honest man to-day, but to-morrow may be a rogue; the god-state, whom infatuated philosophers are constantly working to aggrandize, to make all-powerful, and for which they strive night and day to win more worshippers. This is to be the one owner and possessor of all; the state shall have all, organize and work all, distribute and apportion all, be the centre, the fountain head, and the goal of all; while in this universal domain where the state controls all, this huge arsenal where the state produces, executes, or orders all, society shall become a human hive, vast as the earth itself, but in which every individual shall be reduced, as a terse writer has put it, to the size and functions of a bee. This is the masterpiece elaborated by the socialist idea—the dream of universal property, which is likewise a dream of universal levelling, universal stuntedness. Individual responsibility or initiative is swept away; human kingship and free-will disappear; domestic society is left without a material basis, and even public society without a foundation; the right of all is practically the right of none, and the result is universal slavery to universal despotism. Such is the miracle of this transformation of property, so glibly promised by the socialist theory to future generations; and though all who fight under the banner of legal spoliation do not carry thus far their social ideal, and do not look forward to such absolute communism, all are on the road to it by the very fact of vesting in their god-state the right of increasing and decreasing, making or unmaking, individual property under the name of taxes on the rich and rates for the poor. What astonishes me above all in this respect is to see in certain men, the most interested personally in the upholding of the conservative principle of property, a certain pandering to, or half-support of, this eminently anti-social idea.
The same socialism which attacks the immemorial constitution of property attacks likewise the immemorial constitution of the family. The socialist idea attacks specially in the family, together with the principle of property, the three things which are its pride, its strength, and its stability—namely, unity, indissolubility, and inheritance, which, it is needless to say, uphold its permanence and perpetuity. First of all, it attacks unity, and unity in trinity: one man, one woman, and one whole family springing from both; one life produced by two sources fused into one—a unity which, in the family as everywhere else, is the essential condition of harmony, order, beauty, and happiness. This unity does not please the socialist. An advocate of free morals and free love, he prefers polygamy, as allowed by the Koran and practised by Moslems, to the conjugal unity enjoined by the Gospel and sanctioned by the teaching and practice of Christendom. Socialism attacks the indissolubility—that is, the permanence—of the marriage tie. Such an indissolubility before God and before the state is in its eyes only the civil and religious endorsement of slavery, the legal and theological confiscation of liberty. The apostles of free love are unable to understand the principle which binds two human beings to each other for ever and under no matter what circumstances. What revolution allows to society socialism would fain make accessible to the family—that is, perpetual change and unlimited option concerning divorce and separation. Socialism claims unblushingly, in the name of nature and progress, the revolutionary right of a husband to send away his wife, and a wife to leave her husband, as easily as a nation disposes of its sovereigns and its governments—a right equivalent to a permanent revolution in the family and the state, and bearing as its fruit the abolition of inheritance. Inheritance means the tradition of a patrimony; it is the pledge of the stability and perpetuity of domestic or home society; bereft of it, the family, without moorings in the past or hopes in the future, becomes, like the individual, an ephemeral phenomenon, gone in a breath and holding to nothing but the present hour. This right of inheritance has its place in God’s plan and man’s laws; it represents to coming generations the labors, the benefits, the sacrifices of their forefathers; it extends the influence of the latter over their descendants. But socialism does not shrink from questioning it in theory and attacking it in practice. How, it asks, should the will of a dying man be able to transmit beyond his grave a domain to his posterity? Down with a privilege which gives man, when he is a corpse, a posthumous omnipotence in contradiction with the very condition of the dead, and injurious to the freedom of action of the living! Socialism thus saps every conservative family principle, and the spirit it instils into the human mind is destructive to the foundations of home society, in order that it may prepare a clearer path to the eventual destruction of public society.