ultimate _ideal_ and more especially by their _method_ of
social transformation. They combat Marxian socialism because it is
_law-abiding_ and _parliamentary_, and they contend that the most
efficacious and the surest mode of social transformation is _rebellion_.

These assertions which respond to the vagueness of the sentiments and
ideas of too large a portion of the working-class and to the impatience
provoked by their wretched condition, may meet with a temporary,
unintelligent approval, but their effect can be only ephemeral. The
explosion of a bomb may indeed give birth to a momentary emotion, but
it can not advance by the hundredth part of an inch the evolution in
men's minds toward socialism, while it causes a reaction in feeling, a
reaction in part sincere, but skilfully fomented and exploited as a
pretext for repression.

To say to the laborers that, without having made ready the requisite
material means, but especially without solidarity and without an
intelligent conception of the goal and without a high moral purpose,
they ought to rise against the classes in power, is really to play into
the hands of those very classes, since the latter are sure of the
material victory when the evolution is not ripe and the revolution is
not ready.[73]

And so it has been possible to show in the case of the late Sicilian
rebellion, in spite of all the lies of those interested in hiding the
truth, that in those districts where socialism was most advanced and
best understood there were no deeds of personal violence, no revolts,
as, for example, among the peasants of Piana dei Greci, of whom Nicola
Barbato had made intelligent socialists; while those convulsive
movements occurred outside of the field of the socialist propaganda as a
rebellion against the exactions of the local governments and of the
_camorre_,[74] or in those districts where the socialist propaganda was
less intelligent and was stifled by the fierce passions caused by hunger
and misery.[75]

History demonstrates that the countries where revolts have been the most
frequent are those in which social progress is the least advanced. The
popular energies exhaust and destroy themselves in these feverish,
convulsive excesses, which alternate with periods of discouragement and
despair--which are the fitting environment of the Buddhist theory of
_electoral abstention_--a very convenient theory for the conservative
parties. In such countries we never see that conti