preach the dialectic to him. It is continually preached. The
transitoriness of phenomena is impressed upon him by the changes in
industrial combinations, by the constant substitution of new modes of
production for those to which he has been accustomed, substitutions
which may make "an aristocrat of labor" of him to-day, and send him
tramping to-morrow.

The industrial proletarian therefore knows practically what Engels has
taught philosophically. So that when in the course of his political
peregrinations he strays into the socialist movement and there finds
those who profess a socialism based upon abstract conceptions and
"eternal truths" his contempt is as outspoken as that of a Friedrich
Engels who chances upon a certain Eugen Duehring spouting paraphrases
of Rousseau by the socialistic wayside. Engels simply anticipated by
the way of books the point of view reached by the industrial
proletarian of to-day by the way of experience, and by the American
machine-made proletarian in particular. This is a matter of no mean
importance. In the following pages we can detect if we can look beyond
and beneath the mere criticism of Duehring, an attitude of mind, not
of one controversialist to another merely but of an entire class, the
class upon which modern society is driven more and more to rely, to
the class which relies upon it.

For their popular support classes and governments rely upon formulae.
When the cry of "Down with the Tsar" takes the place of the humbly
spoken "Little Father" what becomes of the Tsardom? When the terms
"Liberty" and "Equality" become the jest of the workshop, upon what
basis can a modern democratic state depend? This criticism of "eternal
truths" is destructive criticism, and destructive of much more than
the "truths." It is more destructive than sedition itself. Sedition
may be suppressed cheaply in these days of quick-firing guns and open
streets. But society crumbles away almost insensibly beneath the
mordant acid of contemptuous analysis. So to-day goaded on the one
side by the gibes of the machine-made proletariat, and on the other,
by the raillery of the philosophic jester, society staggers along like
a wounded giant and is only too glad to creep into its cave and to
forget its sorrows in drink.

As for 1875, "Many things have happened since then" as Beaconsfield
used to say, but of all that has happened nothing could have given
more cynical pleasure to the "Old Jew" than the lack of faith