workers.

Even as the Manifesto did not write, as the utopians did, the ethics and
the psychology of the future society, just so it did not give the
mechanism of that formation and of the development in which we find
ourselves. It is surely enough that these few pioneers have opened the
road. We must walk upon it to arrive at understanding and experience.
Moreover man is distinctively the experimental animal; that is why he
has a history, or rather that is why he makes his own history.

Upon this road of contemporary socialism which constitutes its
development because it is its experience, we have met the mass of the
peasants.

Socialism which at first kept itself practically and theoretically to
the study and experience of the antagonisms between capitalists and
proletarians in the circle of industrial production properly so called,
has turned its activity toward that mass in which _peasant stupidity_
blossoms. To capture the peasants is the question of the hour, although
the quintessential Schaeffle long ago mobilized the anti-collectivist
brains of the peasants for the defense of the existing order. The
elimination and the capture of domestic industry by capital, the passage
more and more rapid of agrarian industry into the capitalist form, the
disappearance of small proprietorship, or its lessening through
mortgages, the disappearance of the communal domaines, usury, taxes and
militarism, all this is beginning to work miracles even in those brains
assumed to be props of the existing order.

The Germans have been the pioneers in this field. They were brought to
it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they
have gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the
frontiers of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult;
this fact explains, excuses, and will excuse, the errors which have been
and will be committed.[15] As long as the peasant shall not be gained
over we shall always have behind us this _peasant stupidity_ which
unconsciously repeats, and that because it is stupid, the errors of the
18th Brumaire and the 2d of December. The development of modern society
in Russia will probably proceed on parallel lines with this conquest of
the country districts. When that country shall have entered into the
liberal era with all its imperfections and all its disadvantages, with
all the purely modern forms of exploitation and of proletarization, but
also with the compe