ony of production, and, therefore, proclaims itself resolved to
achieve the prosperity OF ALL, and not only--as some victims of myopia
continue to believe--that of a Fourth Estate, which would simply have to
follow the example of the decaying Third Estate.

Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism, that _every
individual_, unless he be a child, sick or an invalid, _must work, in
order to live_, at one sort or another of useful labor, it follows as an
inevitable consequence that, in a society organized on this principle,
all class antagonism will become impossible; for this antagonism exists
only when society contains a great majority who work, in order to live
in discomfort, and a small minority who live well, without working.

This initial error naturally dominates the entire book. Thus, for
instance, the third chapter is devoted to proving that "the social
revolution planned for by the new socialists, will be the destruction of
all _moral order_ in society, because it is without an _ideal_ to serve
it as a luminous standard" (p. 159).

Let us disregard, my dear Baron, the famous "moral order" of that
society which enriches and honors the well-dressed wholesale thieves of
the great and little Panamas, the banks and railways, and condemns to
imprisonment children and women who steal dry wood or grass in the
fields which formerly belonged to the commune.

But to say that socialism is without an _ideal_, when even its opponents
concede to it this immense superiority in potential strength over the
sordid skepticism of the present world, _viz._, its ardent faith in a
higher social justice for all, a faith that makes strikingly clear its
resemblance to the regenerating Christianity of primitive times (very
different from that "fatty degeneration" of Christianity, called
Catholicism), to say this is truly, for a scientist, to blindly rebel
against the most obvious facts of daily life.

M. Garofalo even goes so far as to say that "the want of the necessaries
of life" is a very exceptional fact, and that therefore the condition of
"the proletariat is a _social condition_ like that of all the other
classes, and the lack of capital, which is its characteristic, is a
permanent economic condition _which is not at all abnormal_ FOR THOSE
WHO ARE USED TO IT."[94]

Then--while passing over this comfortable and egoistic quietism which
finds nothing abnormal in the misery ... of others--we perceive how
deficient M. Garofa