her of these great Utopists had anything like the conception of
social evolution, determined by economic conditions and the resulting
conflicts of economic classes, which constitutes the base of the
philosophy of the scientific Socialists. Each of them had some faint
comprehension of isolated facts, but neither of them developed his
knowledge very far, nor could the facts appear to them as correlated
later by Marx. Saint-Simon, as we know, recognized the class struggle in
the French Revolution, and saw in the Reign of Terror only the momentary
reign of the non-possessing masses;[34] he saw, too, that the political
question was fundamentally an economic question, declaring that politics
is the science of production, and prophesying that politics would be
absorbed by economics.[35] Fourier, we also know, applied the principle
of evolution to society. He divided the history of society into four
great epochs--savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, and
civilization.[36] But just as Saint-Simon failed to grasp the
significance of the class conflict, and its relation to the fundamental
character of economic institutions, which he dimly perceived, so Fourier
failed to grasp the significance of the evolutionary process which he
described, and, like Saint-Simon, he halted upon the brink, so to speak,
of an important discovery. His concept of social evolution meant little
to him and possessed only an academic interest. And Owen, in many
respects the greatest of the three, realized in a practical manner that
the industrial problem was a class conflict. Not only had he found in
1815 that pity was powerless to move the hearts of his
fellow-manufacturers when their class interests were concerned, but
later, in 1818, when he went to present his famous memorial to the
Congress of Sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle, he had another lesson of the
same kind. At Frankfort, Germany, he tarried on his way to the Congress,
and was invited to attend a notable dinner to meet the Secretary of the
Congress, M. Gentz, a famous diplomat of the day, "who enjoyed the full
confidence of the leading despots of Europe." After Owen had outlined
his schemes for social amelioration, M. Gentz was asked for his reply,
and Owen tells us that the diplomat answered, "We know very well that
what you say is true, but how could we govern the masses, if they were
wealthy, and so, independent of us?"[37] Lord Lauderdale, too, had
exclaimed on another occasion, "Nothing [_i.e