rgeoisie to the
very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total
incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the
proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often
as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of
arms and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists, and "Young England," exhibited
this spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different from that
of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under
circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now
antiquated. In showing that under their rule the modern proletariat
never existed they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary
offspring of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of
their criticism, that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie
amounts to this: that under the bourgeois _regime_ a class is being
developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of
society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures
against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high
falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from
the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor for traffic
in wool, beet-root sugar and potato spirit(b).

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has
Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.
Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against
marriages, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of
these charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh,
monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the Holy
Water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the
aristocrat.

(_b_) _Petty Bourgeois Socialism_.

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and
perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors