And so it has been possible to show in the case of the late Sicilian rebellion, in spite of all the lies of those interested in hiding the truth, that in those districts where socialism was most advanced and best understood there were no deeds of personal violence, no revolts, as, for example, among the peasants of Piana dei Greci, of whom Nicola Barbato had made intelligent socialists; while those convulsive movements occurred outside of the field of the socialist propaganda as a rebellion against the exactions of the local governments and of the camorre,[74] or in those districts where the socialist propaganda was less intelligent and was stifled by the fierce passions caused by hunger and misery.[75]

History demonstrates that the countries where revolts have been the most frequent are those in which social progress is the least advanced.  The popular energies exhaust and destroy themselves in these feverish, convulsive excesses, which alternate with periods of discouragement and despair—­which are the fitting environment of the Buddhist theory of electoral abstention—­a very convenient theory for the conservative parties.  In such countries we never see that continuity of premeditated action, slower and less effective in appearance, but in reality the only kind of action that can accomplish those things which appear to us as the miracles of history.

Therefore Marxian socialism in all countries has proclaimed that from this time forth the principal means of social transformation must be the conquest of the public powers (in local administrations as well as in national Parliaments) as one of the results of the organization of the laborers into a class-conscious party.  The further the political organization of the laborers, in civilized countries, shall progress, the more one will see realized, by a resistless evolution, the socialist organization of society, at first by partial concessions, but ever growing more important, wrested from the capitalist class by the working-class (the law restricting the working-day to Eight Hours, for example), and then by the complete transformation of individual ownership into social ownership.

As to the question whether this complete transformation, which is at present being prepared for by a process of gradual evolution which is nearing the critical and decisive period of the social revolution, can be accomplished without the aid of other means of transformation—­such as rebellion and individual violence—­this is a question which no one can answer in advance.  Marxian socialists are not prophets.

Our sincere wish is that the social revolution, when its evolution shall be ripe, may be effected peacefully, as so many other revolutions have been, without blood-shed—­like the English Revolution, which preceded by a century, with its Bill of Rights, the French Revolution; like the Italian Revolution in Tuscany in 1859; like the Brazilian Revolution, with the exile of the Emperor Dom Pedro, in 1892.