r or bitterness toward the
sincere representatives of any faction of the conservative party, though
they combat their ideas unrelentingly. If such or such a socialist shows
himself intolerant, if he abuses his opponents, this is because he is
the victim of a passing emotion or of an ill-balanced temperament; it
is, therefore, very excusable.

The thing that provokes a smile of pity is to see certain conservatives
"young in years, but old in thought"--for conservatism in the young can
be nothing but the effect of calculating selfishness or the index of
psychical anemia--have an air of complacency or of pity for socialists
whom they consider, at best, as "misled," without perceiving that what
is normal is for the old to be conservatives, but that young
conservatives can be nothing but _egoists_ who are afraid of losing the
life of idle luxury into which they were born or the advantages of the
orthodox fashion of dividing (?) the fruits of labor. Their hearts at
least, if not their brains, are abnormally small. The socialist, who has
everything to lose and nothing to gain by boldly declaring his position
and principles, possesses by contrast all the superiority of a
disinterested altruism, especially when having been born in the
aristocratic or the bourgeois class he has renounced the brilliant
pleasure of a life of leisure to defend the cause of the weak and the
oppressed.[85]

But, it is said, these bourgeois socialists act in this way through love
of popularity! This is a strange form of selfishness, at all events,
which prefers to the quickly reaped rewards and profits of bourgeois
individualism, "the socialist idealism" of popular sympathy, especially
when it might gain this sympathy by other means which would compromise
it less in the eyes of the class in power.

Let us hope, in concluding, that when the bourgeoisie shall have to
surrender the economic power and the political power in order that they
may be used for the benefit of all in the new society and that, as
Berenini recently said, victors and vanquished may really become
brothers without distinction of class in the common assured enjoyment of
a mode of life worthy of human beings, let us hope that in surrendering
power, the bourgeoisie will do it with that dignity and self-respect
which the aristocracy showed when it was stripped of its class
privileges by the triumphant bourgeoisie at the time of the French
Revolution.

It is the truth of the message o