class-interests
and of the strength which their union will give them, and that they will
not wake up some day under a full-fledged socialist regime, because
divided and apathetic for 364 days out of the year they shall rebel on
the 365th, or devote themselves to the perpetration of some deed of
personal violence.

This is what I call the psychology of the "_gros lot_" (the capital
prize in a lottery, etc.). Many workingmen imagine, in fact,
that--without doing anything to form themselves into a class-conscious
party--they will win some day the capital prize, the social revolution,
just as the manna is said to have come down from heaven to feed the
Hebrews.

Scientific socialism has pointed out that the transforming power
decreases as we descend the scale from one process to another, that of
revolution being less than that of evolution, and that of rebellion
being less than that of revolution, and individual violence having the
least of all. And since it is a question of a complete transformation
and, consequently, in its juridical, political and ethical organization,
the process of transformation is more effective and better adapted to
the purpose in proportion as its _social_ character predominates over
its _individual_ character.

The individualist parties are individualists even in the daily struggle;
socialism, on the contrary, is collectivist even in that, because it
knows that the present organization does not depend upon the will of
such or such an individual, but upon society as a whole. And this is
also one reason why charity, however generous it be, being necessarily
personal and partial, can not be a remedy for the social, and thereby
collective, question of the distribution of wealth.

In political questions, which leave the economico-social foundation
untouched, it is possible to understand how, for instance, the exile of
Napoleon III. or of the Emperor Don Pedro could inaugurate a republic.
But this transformation does not extend to the foundation of the social
life, and the German Empire or the Italian Monarchy are, socially,
bourgeois just the same as the French Republic or the North American
Republic, because notwithstanding the _political_ differences between
them, they all belong to the same _economico-social_ phase.

This is why the processes of evolution and revolution--the only wholly
social or collective processes--are the most efficacious, while partial
rebellion and, still more, individua