a reduction of
hours, and you will readily understand why the recent English reports
are so unanswerable on the excellent results, even from the capitalist
point of view, of the Eight-Hour reform. The workingmen are less
fatigued, and the production is undiminished.

When these economic reforms, and all those which are based on an exact
physio-psychology, shall be effected under the socialist regime--that is
to say, without the friction and the loss of force that would be
inevitable under capitalist individualism--it is evident that they will
have immense material and moral advantages, notwithstanding the _a
priori_ objections of the present individualism which can not see or
which forgets the profound reflex effects of a change of the social
environment on individual psychology.

[61] ICILIO VANNI, _La funzione practica della filosofia del diritto
considerata in se e in rapporto al socialismo contemporaneo_, Bologne,
1894.

XII.

EVOLUTION--REVOLUTION--REBELLION--INDIVIDUAL VIOLENCE--SOCIALISM AND
ANARCHY.

The last and the gravest of the contradictions that it is attempted to
set up between socialism and the scientific theory of evolution, relates
to the question of _how_ socialism, in practice, will be inaugurated and
realized.

Some think that socialism ought, at the present time, to set forth, in
all its details, the precise and symmetrical form of the future social
organization.--"Show me a practical description of the new society, and
I will then decide whether I ought to prefer it to the present society."

Others--and this is a consequence of that first false
conception--imagine that socialism wishes in a single day to change the
face of the world, and that we will be able to go to sleep in a world
completely bourgeois and to wake up next morning in a world completely
socialist.

How is it possible not to see, some one then says, that all this is
directly and thoroughly in conflict with the law of evolution, a law
based on the two fundamental ideas--which are characteristic of the new
tendencies of scientific thought and which are in conflict with the old
metaphysics--of the _naturalness_ and the _gradualness_ of all phenomena
in all domains of universal life, from astronomy to sociology.

It is indisputable that these two objections were, in great part, well
founded when they were directed against what Engels has called "utopian
socialism."

When socialism, before the time of Karl Marx, w