Now, it suffices to have read the programme of the socialist party, from the MANIFESTO of Marx and Engels down to the propagandist publications, to know, on the contrary, that contemporary socialism wishes, and declares its wish, to accomplish the general suppression of all social divisions into classes by suppressing the division of the social patrimony of production, and, therefore, proclaims itself resolved to achieve the prosperity OF ALL, and not only—­as some victims of myopia continue to believe—­that of a Fourth Estate, which would simply have to follow the example of the decaying Third Estate.

Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism, that every individual, unless he be a child, sick or an invalid, must work, in order to live, at one sort or another of useful labor, it follows as an inevitable consequence that, in a society organized on this principle, all class antagonism will become impossible; for this antagonism exists only when society contains a great majority who work, in order to live in discomfort, and a small minority who live well, without working.

This initial error naturally dominates the entire book.  Thus, for instance, the third chapter is devoted to proving that “the social revolution planned for by the new socialists, will be the destruction of all moral order in society, because it is without an ideal to serve it as a luminous standard” (p. 159).

Let us disregard, my dear Baron, the famous “moral order” of that society which enriches and honors the well-dressed wholesale thieves of the great and little Panamas, the banks and railways, and condemns to imprisonment children and women who steal dry wood or grass in the fields which formerly belonged to the commune.

But to say that socialism is without an ideal, when even its opponents concede to it this immense superiority in potential strength over the sordid skepticism of the present world, viz., its ardent faith in a higher social justice for all, a faith that makes strikingly clear its resemblance to the regenerating Christianity of primitive times (very different from that “fatty degeneration” of Christianity, called Catholicism), to say this is truly, for a scientist, to blindly rebel against the most obvious facts of daily life.

M. Garofalo even goes so far as to say that “the want of the necessaries of life” is a very exceptional fact, and that therefore the condition of “the proletariat is a social condition like that of all the other classes, and the lack of capital, which is its characteristic, is a permanent economic condition which is not at all abnormal FOR THOSE WHO ARE USED TO IT."[94]

Then—­while passing over this comfortable and egoistic quietism which finds nothing abnormal in the misery ... of others—­we perceive how deficient M. Garofalo is, in the most elementary accuracy, in the ascertainment of facts when we recall the suffering and ever-growing multitude of the unemployed, which is sometimes a “local and transitory” phenomenon, but which, in its acute or chronic forms, is always the necessary and incontestable effect of capitalist accumulation and the introduction and improvement of machinery, which are, in their turn, the source of modern socialism, scientific socialism, so different from the sentimental socialism of former times.