l.

Hatred toward such or such an individual--even if it result in his
death--does not advance us a single step toward the solution of the
problem; it rather retards its solution, because it provokes a reaction
in the general feeling against personal violence and it violates the
principle of _respect for the human person_ which socialism proclaims
most emphatically for the benefit of all and against all opponents. The
solution of the problem does not become easier because it is recognized
that the present abnormal condition, which is becoming more and more
acute--misery for the masses and pleasure for a few--is not the
consequence of the bad intentions of such or such an individual.

Viewed from this side also socialism is, in fact, in perfect harmony
with modern science, which denies the free will of man and sees in human
activity, individual and collective, a necessary effect whose
determining causes are the conditions of race and environment, acting
concurrently.[38]

Crime, suicide, insanity, misery are not the fruits of free will, of
individual faults, as metaphysical spiritualism believes, and neither is
it an effect of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist if the
workingman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is poor and
miserable.

All social phenomena are the necessary resultants of the historical
conditions and of the environment. In the modern world the facility and
the greater frequency of communication and relations of every kind
between all parts of the earth have also increased the dependence of
every fact--economic, political, juridical, ethical, artistic or
scientific--upon the most remote and apparently unrelated conditions of
the life of the great world.

The present organization of private property with no restrictions upon
the right of inheritance by descent or upon personal accumulation; the
ever increasing and more perfect application of scientific discoveries
to the facilitation of human labor--the labor of adapting the materials
furnished by Nature to human needs; the telegraph and the steam-engine,
the constantly overflowing torrent of human migrations--all these bind,
with invisible but infrangible threads, the existence of a family of
peasants, work-people or petty trades-people to the life of the whole
world. And the harvest of coffee, cotton or wheat in the most distant
countries makes its effects felt in all parts of the civilized world,
just as the decrease or incr