to rebellion or personal violence to
inaugurate a new social organization. This seems to me like imagining
that a child or a youth could, in a single day, accomplish a biological
evolution and become forthwith an adult.[70]

It is easy to understand how a man out of work, in the horrors of
starvation, his brain giving way for want of nourishment, may fancy that
by giving a policeman a blow with his fist, by throwing a bomb, by
raising a barricade, or by taking part in a riot, he is hastening the
realization of a social ideal, from which injustice will have vanished.

And, even apart from such cases, it is possible to understand how the
power of impulsive feeling, the dominant factor in some natures, may,
through a generous impatience, lead them to make some real attempt--and
not imaginary like those which the police in all times and all countries
prosecute in the courts--to spread terror among those who feel the
political or economic power slipping from their hands.

But scientific socialism, especially in Germany, under the direct
influence of Marxism, has completely abandoned those old methods of
revolutionary romanticism. Though they have often been employed, they
have always resulted abortively, and for that very reason the ruling
classes no longer dread them, since they are only light, localized
assaults on a fortress which still has more than sufficient resistant
power to remain victorious and by this victory to retard temporarily the
evolution by removing from the scene the strongest and boldest
adversaries of the _status quo_.

Marxian socialism is revolutionary in the scientific meaning of the
word, and it is now developing into open social revolution--no one will
attempt to deny, I think, that the close of the nineteenth century marks
the critical phase of the bourgeois evolution rushing under a full head
of steam, even in Italy, along the road of individualist capitalism.

Marxian socialism has the candor to say, through the mouths of its most
authoritative spokesmen, to the great suffering host of the modern
proletariat, that it has no magic wand to transform the world in a
single day, as one shifts the scenes in a theatre; it says on the
contrary, repeating the prophetic exhortation of Marx, "_Proletarians of
all countries, unite_," that the social revolution can not achieve its
object, unless it first becomes a vivid fact in the minds of the workers
themselves by virtue of the clear perception of their