Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/219

Rh the democracy and universal suffrage. It is not by the collapse of the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by the growth of the proletariat, that the Communist order will gradually install itself in our society. Whoever accepts these truths, which have now become necessary, will soon understand the precise and certain methods of social transformation and progressive organisation which they entail. Those who do not completely accept them and those who do not take the decisive result of the proletarian movements of a century very seriously; those who revert to the Communist Manifesto so obviously superannuated by the course of events, or who mix remnants of old thought that no longer contain any truth with the direct and true thoughts suggested by present reality, all such Socialists condemn themselves to a life of chaos.

But I could justify these general affirmations in detail only by the minute analysis of the present tendencies of French Socialism and International Socialism. I could make out the case for the method I have sketched here only by specific applications and by the exposition of a programme of "revolutionary evolution." This I shall attempt in a more systematic work and one more carefully planned than these fragmentary studies, which I now offer by request to those fair-minded readers who are anxious to obtain in these difficult questions even a modest beginning of light.