nsations and the advantages of the political
development of the proletariat, social democracy will no longer have to
fear the threat of unforeseen perils from without, and it will at the
same time have triumphed over the internal perils by the capture of the
peasants.

The example of Italy is instructive. This country after having opened
the capitalist era dropped out for several centuries from the current
history. It is a typical case of decadence which can be studied in a
precise fashion from original documents in all its phases. It partly
returned into history at the time of the Napoleonic domination. It
reconquered its unity and became a modern state after the period of the
reaction and conspiracies, and under circumstances known to all, and
Italy has ended by having all the vices of parliamentarism, of
militarism and of finance without having at the same time the forms of
modern production and the resulting capacity for competition on equal
terms. It cannot compete with countries where industry is more advanced
by reason of the absolute lack of coal and scarcity of iron, the lack of
technical ability,--and it is waiting, or hoping now, that the
application of electricity may permit it to regain the time lost. It is
this which gave the impulse to different attempts from Biella to Schio.
A modern state in a society almost exclusively agricultural and in a
country where agriculture is in great part backward, it is that which
gives birth to this general sentiment of universal discontent.

Thence come the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the
rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the
multitude, the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of
fantastic projects. This singular social spectacle of a development
prevented, retarded, embarrassed and thus uncertain, is brought out in
bold relief by a penetrating spirit which, if it is not always the fruit
and the expression of a modern, broad and real culture nevertheless
bears within itself as the relic of an excellent civilization the mark
of great cerebral refinement. Italy has not been for reasons easy to
guess a suitable field for the indigenous formation of socialist ideas
and tendencies. The Italian Philippe Buonaroti, at first the friend of
the younger Robespierre, become the companion of Babeuf and later
attempted to re-establish Babeufism in France, after 1830. Socialism
made its first appearance in Italy at the