he should rather begin at last to ascertain the law that
underlies his own acts and thoughts, and to endeavor to live his life
according to the laws of Nature. He will arrive at the point when he
will arrange his social life with his fellows, that is, his family and
the State, not after the precepts of far-back centuries, but after the
rational principles of natural sense. Politics, morals, principles of
justice--all of which are at present fed from all possible sources--will
be determined according to the laws of Nature alone. An existence worthy
of human beings, dreamed of for thousands of years, will finally become
reality."[226]

That day is approaching with giant strides. Human society has traversed,
in the course of thousands of years, all the various phases of
development, to arrive in the end where it started from,--communistic
property and complete equality and fraternity, but no longer among
congeners alone, but among the whole human race. In that does the great
progress consist. What bourgeois society has vainly striven for, and at
which it suffers and is bound to suffer shipwreck--the restoration of
freedom, equality and fraternity among men--Socialism will accomplish.
Bourgeois society could only set up the theory; here, as in so many
other respects, their practice was at odds with their theories. It is
for Socialism to harmonize the theory with the practice.

Nevertheless, while man returns to the starting point in his
development, the return is effected upon an infinitely higher social
plane than that from which he started. Primitive society held property
in common in the gens and clan, but only in the rawest and most
undeveloped stage. The process of development that took place since,
reduced, it is true, the common property to a small and insignificant
vestige, broke up the gentes, and finally atomized the whole of society;
but, simultaneously, it raised mightily the productivity of that society
in its various phases and the manifoldness of social necessities, and it
created out of the gentes and tribes nations and great States, although
again it produced a condition of things that stood in violent
contradiction with social requirements. The task of the future is to end
the contradiction by the re-transformation upon the broadest basis, of
property and productive powers into collective property.

Society re-takes what once was its own, but, in accord with the newly
created conditions of production, it