Another contemporary artificial product has contributed to confirm this impression—­State Socialism.  At bottom, it does not differ from sentimental or utopian socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the socialist congress of Berlin (1892), it would be “a State Capitalism which would join political slavery to economic exploitation.”  State Socialism is a symptom of the irresistible power of scientific and democratic socialism—­as is shown by the famous rescripts of Emperor William convoking an international conference to solve (this is the infantile idea of the decree) the problems of labor, and the famous Encyclical on “The Condition of Labor” of the very able Pope, Leo XIII, who has handled the subject with great tact and cleverness.[65] But these imperial rescripts and these papal encyclicals—­because it is impossible to leap over or suppress the phases of the social evolution—­could only result abortively in our bourgeois, individualist and laissez faire world.  Certainly it would not have been displeasing to this bourgeois world to see the vigorous contemporary socialism strangled to death in the amorous embraces of official artificiality and of State Socialism, for it had become evident in Germany and elsewhere, that neither laws nor repressive measures of any kind could kill it.[66]

All that arsenal of rules and regulations and provisions for inspection and superintendence has nothing in common with scientific socialism which foresees clearly that the executive guidance of the new social organization will be no more confused than is the present administration of the State, the provinces and the communes, and will, on the contrary, be much better adapted to subserve the interests of both society and the individual, since it will be a natural product and not a parasitic product of the new social organization.  Just so, the nervous system of a mammal is the regulating apparatus of its organism; it is, certainly, more complex than that of the organism of a fish or of a mollusc, but it has not, for that reason, tyrannically stifled the autonomy of the other organs and anatomical machinery, or of the cells in their living confederation.

It is understood, then, that to refute socialism, something more is needed than the mere repetition of the current objections against that artificial and sentimental socialism which still continues to exist, I confess, in the nebulous mass of popular ideas.  But every day it is losing ground before the intelligent partisans—­workingmen, middle-class or aristocrats—­of scientific socialism which armed—­thanks to the impulse received from the genius of Marx—­with all the best-established inductions of modern science, is triumphing over the old objections which our adversaries, through force of mental custom, still repeat, but which have long been left behind by contemporary thought, together with the utopian socialism which provoked them.

The same reply must be made to the second part of the objection, with regard to the mode by which the advent of socialism will be accomplished.