credulity of the
public.

But if this description may be legitimately applied to the brains behind
Socialism and to certain of its leading doctrinaires, there are
doubtless thousands of honest visionaries to be found in the movement. A
system that professes to cure all the ills of life inevitably appeals to
generous minds that feel but do not reason. In reality many of these
people, did they but know it, are simply social reformers at heart and
not Socialists at all, and their ignorance of what Socialism really
means leads them to range themselves under the banner of a party that
claims a monopoly of ideals. Others again, particularly amongst the
young intelligentsia, take up Socialism in the same spirit as they would
adopt a fashion in ties or waistcoats, for fear of being regarded as
"reactionaries." That in reality, far from being "advanced," the
profession of Socialism is as retrogressive as would be a return to the
side-whiskers and plaid trousers of the last century, does not occur to
them. The great triumph of Mussolini was to make the youth of Italy
realize that to be a Communist was to be a "back number," and that
progress consisted in marching forward to new ideas and aspirations. The
young men of Cabet's settlement discovered this sixty years ago when
they formed themselves into a band of "Progressives" in opposition to
the old men who still clung to the obsolete doctrine of Communism.

Socialism at the present moment is in reality less a creed than a cult,
founded not on practical experience but on unreal theory. It is here we
find a connexion with secret societies. M. Augustin Cochin in his
brilliant essays on the French Revolution[738] has described that "World
of the Clouds" of which the Grand Orient was the capital, peopled by the
precursors of the French Revolution. "Whilst in the real world the
criterion of all thought lies in putting it to the test," there in the
World of the Clouds the criterion is opinion. "They are there to talk,
not to do; all this intellectual agitation, this immense traffic in
speeches, writings, correspondence, leads not to the slightest beginning
of work, of real effort." We should be wrong to judge them harshly;
their theories on the perfectibility of human nature, on the advantages
of savagery, which appear to us "dangerous chimeras," were never
intended to apply to real life, only to the World of the Clouds, where
they present no danger but become, on the contrary, "the m