One of the inevitable and logical consequences of utopian and artificial socialism is to think that the architectonic construction proposed by such or such a reformer, ought to be and can be put into practice in a single day by a decree.

In this sense it is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, looked at in this way, I combatted it in my book on Socialismo e Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism were not yet generally disseminated in Italy.

A political party or a scientific theory are natural products which must pass through the vital phases of infancy and youth, before reaching complete development.  It was, then, inevitable that, before becoming scientific or positif (fact-founded), socialism, in Italy as in other countries, should pass through the infantile phases of clannish exclusiveness—­the era when socialism was confined to organizations of manual laborers—­and of nebulous romanticism which, as it gives to the word revolution a narrow and incomplete meaning, is always fed with false hope by the illusion that a social organism can be radically changed in a single day with four rifle-shots, just as a monarchical regime could thus be converted into a republican regime.

But it is infinitely easier to change the political envelope of a social organization,—­because such a change has little effect on the economic foundation of the social life,—­than to completely revolutionize this social life in its economic constitution.

The processes of social transformation, as well as—­under various names—­those of every sort of transformation in living organisms are:  evolution,—­revolution,—­rebellion,—­individual violence.

A mineral or vegetable or animal species may pass through, during the cycle of its existence, these four processes.

As long as the structure and the volume of the centre of crystallization, the germ, or the embryo, increase gradually, we have a gradual and continuous process of evolution, which must be followed at a definite stage by a process of revolution, more or less prolonged, represented, for example, by the separation of the entire crystal from the mineral mass which surrounds it, or by certain revolutionary phases of vegetable or animal life, as, for example, the moment of sexual reproduction; there may also be a period of rebellion, that is to say, of organized personal violence, a frequent and well-verified phenomenon among those species of animals who live in societies; there may also be isolated instances of personal violence, as in the struggles to obtain food or for possession of the females between animals of the same species.