lf with the petty bourgeois in the desire
of saving what cannot be saved:--as, for example, small proprietorship,
or the tranquil life of the small proprietor whom the bewildering action
of the modern state, the necessary and natural organ of present society,
destroys and overturns, because by its constant revolutions it carries
in itself the necessity for other revolutions new and more fundamental.

Neither did it translate into metaphysical whimsicalities, into a sickly
sentimentalism, or into a religious contemplation, the real contrasts of
the material interests of every day life: on the contrary, it exposed
those contrasts in all their prosaic reality. It did not construct the
society of the future upon a plan harmoniously conceived in each of its
parts. It has no word of eulogy and exaltation, of invocation and of
regret, for the two goddesses of philosophic mythology, justice and
equality, those two goddesses who cut so sad a figure in the practical
affairs of everyday life, when we observe that the history of so many
centuries maliciously amuses itself by nearly always contradicting their
infallible suggestions. Once more these communists, while declaring on
the strength of facts which carry conviction that the mission of the
proletarians is to be the grave diggers of the bourgeoisie, still
recognize the latter as the author of a social form which represents
extensively and intensively an important stage of progress, and which
alone can furnish the field for the new struggles which already give
promise of a happy issue for the proletariat. Never was funeral oration
so magnificent. There is in these praises addressed to the bourgeoisie a
certain tragical humor,--they have been compared to dithyrambics.

The negative and antithetical definitions of other forms of socialism
then current, which have often re-appeared since, even up to the present
time, although they are fundamentally beyond criticism both in their
form and their aim, nevertheless, do not pretend to be and are not the
real history of socialism; they furnish neither its outlines nor its
plan for him who would write it. History in reality does not rest upon
the distinction between the true and the false, the just and the unjust
and still less upon the more abstract antithesis between the possible
and the real as if the things were on one side and on another side were
their shadows and their reflections in ideas. History is all of a piece,
and it rests