Page:Alexander Jonas - Reporter and Socialist (1885).djvu/67

 that the aspirations of the Socialists are rational, practicable. If they are carried out in practice, a society will be organized in which every one will have the means to live like a human being, and to participate in the comforts and enjoyments of life brought forth and produced by a society whose members are all contributing their best efforts to the common welfare. In such a society the interests of one are the concern of all, and vice versa, while the economic institutions will be so regulated that no individual can live upon the labor of others, i. e. that no one can rob the rest. I now ask you whether any intelligent human being could doubt that such a society with such noble aims and objects would not easily solve all the minor questions of matrimony, family, education, elections, taxation, etc.?! For, and I have to repeat it, upon a communistic-economic basis humanity would be afforded, for the first time in its history the possibility, I might even say the necessity, of an harmonious development. Who would doubt that such an harmonious development will take place?

(after reflecting for a short while): I shall leave this question to be answered by the learned gentlemen of our editorial staff, for I, on my part, have no longer any objections.

But I have one more, and a very momentous question to ask you: How are you going to bring about that great, enormous revolution which is to replace the present society by the socialistic one?

This is one of the commonly occurring questions which—allow me to say so—are generally asked mostly by thoughtless people who know nothing of history. No revolution has ever been "made," but a radical change of social systems where one principle is substituted for one of totally different tendency—and this is what I mean by revolution—has always been effected according to the natural development of society itself without the possibility for any one to arrest or materially accelerate its course, and therein lies the certainty with which we expect the victory of our ideas that they are not idle speculations, but that they are based upon facts, and that they must necessarily, according to natural development, once become a reality.