ly private services and properties? These intermediate
phases can not be suppressed by decrees, but they develop and finish
their course naturally day by day, under the pressure of the economic
and social conditions; but, by a natural and therefore inexorable
progress, they are constantly approaching more closely that ultimate
phase of absolute collectivism in the means of production, which the
socialists have not invented, but the tendency toward which they have
shown, and whose ultimate attainment they scientifically predict. The
rate of progress toward this goal they can accelerate by giving to the
proletarians, organized into a class-party, a clearer consciousness of
their historic mission.

* * * * *

All through this book are scattered not only defects of method, but also
actual errors in matters of fact. The book is also marred by an immanent
contradiction that runs all through it, in connection with the
absolutely uncompromising attitude against socialism which the author
aims to maintain, but which he is unable to keep up in the face of the
irresistible tendency of the facts, as we shall see in the conclusion of
this analysis.

In chapter IV, M. Garofalo contends that civilization would be menaced
with destruction by the elevation to power of the popular classes. M.
Garofalo, who is of an old aristocratic family, declares that "the Third
Estate, which should have substituted youthful energies for the
feebleness and corruption of an effete and degenerate aristocracy, has
shown magnified _a hundred-fold_ the defects and corruption of the
latter" (p. 206). This is certainly not a correct historical judgment;
for it is certain that the Third Estate, which with the French
Revolution gained political ascendancy--a political ascendancy made
inevitable by its previously won economic ascendancy,--gave in the
course of the Nineteenth Century a new and powerful impulse to
civilization. And if to-day, after a century of undisputed domination,
the bourgeoisie shows "multiplied a hundred-fold" the defects and the
corruption of the aristocracy of the Eighteenth Century, this signifies
simply that the Third Estate has reached the final phase of its
parabola, so that the advent of a more developed social phase is
becoming an imminent historical necessity.

* * * * *

Another error in criminal psychology--natural enough for idealists and
metaphysicians, but whic