o strikingly called
the attention of sociologists--continue to be cultivated and yield a
return which is not lower than that yielded by lands held in private
ownership, although these communist or collectivist farmers have only
the right of use and enjoyment, and not the absolute title.[58]

If some of these survivals of collective ownership are disappearing, or
if their administration is bad, this can not be an argument against
socialism, since it is easy to understand that, in the present economic
organization based on absolute individualism, these organisms do not
have an environment which furnishes them the conditions of a possible
existence.

It is as though one were to wish a fish to live out of water, or a
mammal in an atmosphere containing no oxygen.

These are the same considerations which condemn to a certain death all
those famous experiments--the socialist, communist or anarchist colonies
which it has been attempted to establish in various places as
"experimental trials of socialism." It seems not to have been
understood that such experiments could only result in inevitable
abortions, obliged as they are to develop in an individualist economic
and moral environment which can not furnish them the conditions
essential for their physiological development, conditions which they
will, on the contrary, have when the whole social organization shall be
guided by the collectivist principle, that is to say, when society shall
be _socialized_.[59]

Then individual tendencies and psychological aptitudes will adapt
themselves to the environment. It is natural that in an individualist
environment, a world of free competition, in which every individual sees
in every other if not an adversary, at least a competitor, anti-social
egoism should be the tendency which is inevitably most highly developed,
as a necessary result of the instinct of self-preservation, especially
in these latest phases of a civilization which seems to be driven at
full steam, compared to the pacific and gentle individualism of past
centuries.

In an environment where every one, in exchange for intellectual or
manual labor furnished to society, will be assured of his daily bread
and will thus be saved from daily anxiety, it is evident that egoism
will have far fewer stimulants, fewer occasions to manifest itself than
solidarity, sympathy and altruism will have. Then that pitiless
maxim--_homo homini lupus_--will cease to be true--a maxim which,