known to him, and by his blind
faith in the priest, who stands to him as a magician and sorcerer. In
what fashion could the modern proletarian of the great industrial
cities, exposed continuously to the alternatives of misery or
subjection, how could he realize that way of living, regulated and
monotonous, which was the one suited to the members of the trade guilds,
whose existence seemed imbedded in a providential plan? From what
intuitive elements of experience could the hog merchant of Chicago, who
furnishes Europe with so many products at a cheap rate, extract the
conditions of serenity and intellectual elevation which gave to the
Athenian the qualities of the noble and good man, and to the Roman
citizen, the dignity of heroism? What power of docile Christian
persuasion will extract from the souls of the modern proletarians their
natural reasons of hate against their determined or undetermined
oppressors? If they wish that justice be done, they must appeal to
violence; and before the love of one's neighbor as a universal law can
appear possible to them, they must imagine a life very different from
the present life, which makes a necessity of hatred. In this society of
differentiations, hatred, pride, hypocrisy, falsehood, baseness,
injustice and all the catechism of the cardinal vices and their
accessories make a sad appendage to the morality, equal for all, upon
which they constitute the satire.

Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the
subjective and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets
obstacles to its development. In this only, that is to say, within these
limits, we can recognize some value in the affirmation that morality
corresponds to the social situations, and, _in the last analysis_, to
the economic conditions. Only an idiot could believe that the individual
morality of each one is proportionate to his individual economic
situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically
irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and
also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does
not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment
and of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the
development of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his
class and his social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of
the mass, of those phenomena which form, or should form, th