Page:Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome - William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax (1909).djvu/30

 16 For until recently amongst cultivated people, enjoying whatever advantages may be derived from civilisation, there has been an almost universal belief, not yet much broken into, that modern or bourgeois civilisation is the final form of human society. Were this the case we should be pessimists indeed, but happily we know that civilisation is only a stage in the development of the human race, just as barbarism was, or the savagery of the progressive nations. Civilisation must of necessity develop into some other form of society, the tendencies of which we can see, but not the details; for it is now becoming clear that this new state of society can only be reached through the great economic, moral, and political change which we call Socialism; and the essential foundation of this is the raising of the working classes to a point that gives them a control over their own labour and its product.

In order that our readers may get a correct view of this, it is necessary to use the historic method—that is to say, to trace the development of society from its early times up to the full expression of