Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/82

32 all are serving the cause of evolution, in other words, at the present moment, the cause of Socialism; because they do not stop at the surface of history but penetrate to the depths, and because they reveal to mankind the eternal motion that is continually breaking up and remoulding property according to new forms and new laws. And it is impossible that these studies of the great scholars should not penetrate gradually, through intermediaries, even to the middle-class youth.

So when the Radicals, hoping to put a stop to, or at least impede, the movement of working-class emancipation, speak of the thing that they, in their scholastic jargon, call private property, they will find themselves the object on the one hand of the anger of the labour democracy which will justly take them to task for defending the form of capitalist property under cover of an ambiguous phrase, and on the other of the disdain of science, which will contrast the reality of historic evolution with their abstract and petrified conception of property.

The time is not far off when no one will be able to speak to the public about the preservation of private property without covering himself with ridicule and putting himself voluntarily into an inferior rank. That which reigns to-day under the name of private property is really class property, and those who wish for the establishment of democracy in the economic as well as the