t the
bourgeoisie has done for human civilization, or of tearing out the pages
of gold that it has written in the history of the civilized world by its
brilliant development of the various nations, by its marvelous
applications of science to industry, and by the commercial and
intellectual relations which it has developed between different peoples.

These are permanent conquests of human progress, and socialism does not
deny them any more than it wishes to destroy them, and it accords a just
tribute of recognition to the generous pioneers who have achieved them.
The attitude of socialism toward the bourgeoisie might be compared to
that of atheists who do not wish either to destroy or to refuse their
admiration to a painting of Raphael or to a statue of Michel-Angelo,
because these works represent and give the seal of eternity to religious
legends.

But socialism sees in the present bourgeois civilization, arrived at its
decline, the sad symptoms of an irremediable dissolution, and it
contends that it is necessary to rid the social organism of its
infectious _poison_, and this not by ridding it of such or such a
bankrupt, of such or such a corrupt official, of such or such a
dishonest contractor ... but by going to the root of the evil, to the
indisputable source of the virulent infection. By radically transforming
the regime--through the substitution of social ownership for individual
ownership--it is necessary to renew the healthy and vital forces of
human society, to enable it to rise to a higher phase of civilization.
Then, it is true, the privileged classes will no longer be able to pass
their lives in idleness, luxury and dissipation, and they will have to
make up their minds to lead an industrious and less ostentatious life,
but the immense majority of men will rise to the heights of serene
dignity, security and joyous brotherhood, instead of living in the
sorrows, anxieties and bitter strife of the present.

An analogous response may be made to that banal objection that socialism
will suppress all liberty--that objection repeated to satiety by all
those who more or less consciously conceal, under the colors of
political liberalism, the tendencies of economic conservatism.

That repugnance which many people, even in good faith, show toward
socialism, is it not the manifestation of another law of human evolution
which Herbert Spencer has formulated thus: "Every progress effected is
an obstacle to further progre