f socialism and its perfect agreement
with the most certain inductions of experimental science which explain
to us not only its tremendous growth and progress, which could not be
merely the purely negative effect of a material and moral malady
rendered acute by a period of social crisis, but above all it explains
to us that unity of intelligent, disciplined, class-conscious solidarity
which presents, in the world-wide celebration of the first of May, a
moral phenomenon of such grandeur that human history presents no
parallel example, if we except the movement of primitive Christianity
which had, however, a much more restricted field of action than
contemporary socialism.

Henceforth--disregarding the hysterical or unreasoning attempts to
revert from bourgeois scepticism to mysticism as a safeguard against the
moral and material crisis of the present time, attempts which make us
think of those lascivious women who become pious bigots on growing
old[86]--henceforth both partisans and adversaries of socialism are
forced to recognize the fact that, like Christianity at the dissolution
of the Roman world, Socialism constitutes the only force which restores
the hope of a better future to the old and disintegrating human
society--a hope no longer begotten by a faith inspired by the
unreasoning transports of sentiment, but born of rational confidence in
the inductions of modern experimental science.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[78] J. E. TH. ROGERS, The Economic Interpretation of History, London,
1888.

[79] LORIA, _Les Bases economiques de la constitution sociale_, 2nd
edition, Paris, 1894. (This work is available in English under the
title: "The Economic Foundations of Society." Swan Sonnenschein,
London.--Tr.)

To the general idea of Karl Marx, Loria adds a theory about "the
occupation of free land," which is the fundamental cause of the
technical explanation of the different econo-micro-social organizations,
a theory which he has amply demonstrated in his _Analisi della proprieta
capitalistica_, Turin, 1892.

[80] It is seen what our judgment must be regarding the thesis
maintained by Ziegler, in his book: _La question sociale est une
question morale_ (The social question is a moral question). French
trans., Paris, 1894. Just as psychology is an effect of physiology, so
the moral phenomena are effects of the economic facts. Such books are
only intended, more or less consciously, to divert attention from the
vital po