ass, is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie
threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the
concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a
revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two
birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric,
steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in
which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths" all
skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods
amongst such a public.

And on its part, German Socialism recognized more and more its own
calling as the bombastic representative of the petty bourgeois
philistine.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German
petty philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness
of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation,
the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme
length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of
Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all
class-struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist
and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong
to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.

2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM.

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances,
in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians,
improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity,
members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals,
temperance fanatics, hole and corner reformers of every imaginable
kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into
complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon's _Philosophie de la Misere_ as an example of this
form.

The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social
conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting
therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its
revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie
without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world
in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops