nuity of premeditated
action, slower and less effective in appearance, but in reality the only
kind of action that can accomplish those things which appear to us as
the miracles of history.

Therefore Marxian socialism in all countries has proclaimed that from
this time forth the principal means of social transformation must be
_the conquest of the public powers_ (in local administrations as well as
in national Parliaments) as one of the results of the organization of
the laborers into a class-conscious party. The further the political
organization of the laborers, in civilized countries, shall progress,
the more one will see realized, by a resistless evolution, the socialist
organization of society, at first by partial concessions, but ever
growing more important, wrested from the capitalist class by the
working-class (the law restricting the working-day to Eight Hours, for
example), and then by the complete transformation of individual
ownership into social ownership.

As to the question whether this complete transformation, which is at
present being prepared for by a process of gradual evolution which is
nearing the critical and decisive period of the social revolution, can
be accomplished without the aid of other means of transformation--such
as rebellion and individual violence--this is a question which no one
can answer in advance. Marxian socialists are not prophets.

Our sincere wish is that the social revolution, when its evolution shall
be ripe, may be effected peacefully, as so many other revolutions have
been, without blood-shed--like the English Revolution, which preceded by
a century, with its _Bill of Rights_, the French Revolution; like the
Italian Revolution in Tuscany in 1859; like the Brazilian Revolution,
with the exile of the Emperor Dom Pedro, in 1892.

It is certain that socialism by spreading education and culture among
the people, by organizing the workers into a class-conscious party under
its banner, is only increasing the probability of the fulfilment of our
hope, and is dissipating the old forebodings of a _reaction_ after the
advent of socialism, which were indeed justified when socialism was
still utopian in its means of realization instead of being, as it now
is, a natural and spontaneous, and therefore inevitable and irrevocable,
phase of the evolution of humanity.

Where will this social revolution start? I am firmly convinced that if
the Latin peoples, being Southerners, are more