y
political questions, and, above all, the question as to the form of
the State, sink into the background, while it became more and more
clearly seen that the equality of constitutional rights was no longer
real equality, and that the attainment of equality necessitated the
abolition of all privileges, including also the privilege of free
possession or of property. Henceforth, therefore, every revolutionary
power attacks no longer political points but the question of property,
and even though all movements did not proceed so far as to open
Communism, yet they were animated by the main idea that the question
of human poverty was to be solved only by limitation of the right of
free acquisition, possession, and disposal of property.

The dogma of the sanctity of property was in any case gone for ever.
But still the last dogma, that of the inviolability of the State,
remained. The Franco-German Socialists of the third and fourth decades
of our century, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Weitling, Rodbertus, down to Louis
Blanc himself, did not think of denying the State as such, but had
thought of it as playing the principal part in the execution of their
new scheme of organisation of industry and society. But the very
character of the new reforming tendencies necessitated an unlimited
preponderance of State authority which would crush out the freedom of
decision in the individual. And a directly opposite tendency, opposed
to all authority, could appear, therefore,--though certainly from the
nature of the case necessary,--at first only as a very feeble
opposition.

The principle of equality was not disputed, but the use of brute force
through the power of the State was regarded with horror in the form in
which the followers of Baboeuf, the enthusiasts for Utopianism,
preached it. The necessity for an organisation of industry was not
denied, but men began to ask the question whether this organisation
could not proceed from below upwards till it reached freedom? Already
Fourier's phalanxes might be regarded as such an attempt to organise
industry through the formation of free groups from below upwards; an
attempt to which the Monarchists and Omniarchists are merely an
exterior addition. If we leave out of consideration the rapid failure
of the various Socialistic attempts at institutions based upon the
foundation of authority, yet the sad experiences of half a century
filled with continual constitutional changes would have sufficed to
un