the exact character of all
the particular details of its personality, which will be developed
naturally and spontaneously, in conformity with the hereditary organic
conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live.

This is what can be and what must be the reply of every socialist. This
is the position taken by Bebel in the German _Reichstag_[63] in his
reply to those who wish to know at the present time what all the details
of the future State will be, and who skilfully profiting by the
ingenuity of the socialist romancers, criticize their artificial
fantasies which are true in their general outlines, but arbitrary in
their details.

It would have been just the same thing if, before the French
Revolution,--which, as it were, hatched out the bourgeois world,
prepared and matured during the previous evolution,--the nobility and
the clergy, the classes then in power, had asked the representatives of
the Third Estate--bourgeois by birth, though some aristocrats or priests
embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their
caste, as the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbe Sieyes--"But what sort of
a world will this new world of yours be? Show us first its exact plan,
and after that we will decide!"

The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would not have been able to answer
this question, because it was impossible for them to foresee what the
human society of the nineteenth century was to be. But this did not
prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place because it
represented the next natural and inevitable phase of an eternal
evolution. This is now the position of socialism with relation to the
bourgeois world. And if this bourgeois world, born only about a century
ago, is destined to have a much shorter historical cycle than the feudal
(aristocratico-clerical) world, this is simply because the marvelous
scientific progress of the nineteenth century has increased a
hundred-fold the rapidity of life in time and has nearly annihilated
space, and, therefore, civilized humanity traverses now in ten years the
same road that it took, in the Middle Ages, a century or two to travel.

The continuously accelerated velocity of human evolution is also one of
the laws established and proved by modern social science.

It is the artificial constructions of sentimental socialism which have
given birth to the idea--correct so far as they are concerned--that
_socialism_ is synonymous with _tyranny_