In this sense, evolution and revolution constitute the most fruitful and surest processes of social metamorphosis.  As human society forms a natural and living organism, like all other organisms, it can not endure sudden transformations, as those imagine who think that recourse must be had only or by preference to rebellion or personal violence to inaugurate a new social organization.  This seems to me like imagining that a child or a youth could, in a single day, accomplish a biological evolution and become forthwith an adult.[70]

It is easy to understand how a man out of work, in the horrors of starvation, his brain giving way for want of nourishment, may fancy that by giving a policeman a blow with his fist, by throwing a bomb, by raising a barricade, or by taking part in a riot, he is hastening the realization of a social ideal, from which injustice will have vanished.

And, even apart from such cases, it is possible to understand how the power of impulsive feeling, the dominant factor in some natures, may, through a generous impatience, lead them to make some real attempt—­and not imaginary like those which the police in all times and all countries prosecute in the courts—­to spread terror among those who feel the political or economic power slipping from their hands.

But scientific socialism, especially in Germany, under the direct influence of Marxism, has completely abandoned those old methods of revolutionary romanticism.  Though they have often been employed, they have always resulted abortively, and for that very reason the ruling classes no longer dread them, since they are only light, localized assaults on a fortress which still has more than sufficient resistant power to remain victorious and by this victory to retard temporarily the evolution by removing from the scene the strongest and boldest adversaries of the status quo.

Marxian socialism is revolutionary in the scientific meaning of the word, and it is now developing into open social revolution—­no one will attempt to deny, I think, that the close of the nineteenth century marks the critical phase of the bourgeois evolution rushing under a full head of steam, even in Italy, along the road of individualist capitalism.

Marxian socialism has the candor to say, through the mouths of its most authoritative spokesmen, to the great suffering host of the modern proletariat, that it has no magic wand to transform the world in a single day, as one shifts the scenes in a theatre; it says on the contrary, repeating the prophetic exhortation of Marx, “Proletarians of all countries, unite,” that the social revolution can not achieve its object, unless it first becomes a vivid fact in the minds of the workers themselves by virtue of the clear perception of their class-interests and of the strength which their union will give them, and that they will not wake up some day under a full-fledged socialist regime, because divided and apathetic for 364 days out of the year they shall rebel on the 365th, or devote themselves to the perpetration of some deed of personal violence.