fact in human nature, which especially might
serve as a decisive argument against socialism.

A singular spectacle, and a singular contrast! Capital, however
produced, tended to overcome all previous forms of production, and,
breaking every bond and boundary, to become the direct or indirect
master of society, as, in fact, it has become in the greater part of the
world; hence it resulted, that apart from all forms of modern misery and
the new hierarchy in which we live, there was realized the most acute
antithesis of all history, that is to say, the existing anarchy of
production in the whole of society, and an iron despotism in the mode of
production in each workshop and each factory! And the thinkers, the
philosophers, the economists and the popularizers of the eighteenth
century saw nothing but liberty and equality! All reasoned in the same
way; all started from the same premises, which brought them to conclude
that liberty must be obtained from a government of pure administration,
or that they were democrats or even communists. The approaching reign of
liberty was before the eyes of all as a certain event, provided they
could suppress the bonds and fetters which forced ignorance and the
despotism of church and state had imposed upon men, good by nature.
These fetters did not appear to be conditions and boundaries within
which men were found by the laws of their development, and by the effect
of the antagonistic and thus uncertain and tortuous movement of history,
but simply obstacles from which the methodical use of reason was to
deliver us. In this idealism, which reached its culminating point in
certain heroes of the French Revolution, is the seed of a limitless
faith in the certain progress of the whole human race. For the first
time, the concept of humanity appeared in all its branches, unmingled
with religious ideas or hypotheses. The boldest of these idealists were
the extreme materialists, because, denying every religious fiction, they
assigned this earth as a certain domain to the necessity of happiness
provided that reason might open the way.

Never were ideas abused in so inhuman a fashion as between the close of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The lesson
of things was very hard, the saddest disillusions arose and a radical
upheaval followed in the minds of men. Facts, in a word, proved to be
contrary to all expectations; and this at first produced a profound
discouragement a