ay be called the Duehring stage of controversy. There are two very
distinct impulses towards socialism. The individuals who are
influenced by these impulses must sooner or later come into collision,
and as a result of the impact the movement is for a time divided into
hostile parties and a war of pamphleteering and oratory supervenes.
This period has just ended in France. For the last few years the
French movement has been divided upon the question of the
philosophical foundation of the movement, and the parties to the
controversy may be divided into those who sought to justify the
movement upon ethical grounds and those who have regarded it as a
modern political phenomenon dependent alone upon economic conditions.
The former of these parties based its claims to the suffrages of the
French people upon the justice of the socialistic demands. It
proclaimed socialism to be the logical result of the Revolution, the
necessary conclusion from the teachings of the revolutionary
philosophers. Justice was the word in which they summed up the claims
of socialism, that and Equality, for which latter term as Engels
points out in the present work, the French have a fondness which
amounts almost to a mania. Hence one party of the French socialist
movement chose as a platform those very "eternal truths" which Engels
ridicules and which it is the sole purpose of the present work to
attack.

To kill "eternal truths" is however by no means an easy matter. Years
of habit have made them part of the mental structure of the citizens
of the modern democratic or semi-democratic states. Not only in France
but to an even greater degree in the English speaking countries these
"eternal truths" persist, they form the stock in trade of the
clergyman and the ordinary politician. Bernard Shaw directs the
shafts of his ridicule against these "eternal truths" and smites with
a sarcasm which is more fatal than all the solemn German philosophy
which Engels has at his command. But Shaw is not appreciated by the
British socialist. The latter cannot imagine that the writer is really
poking fun at things so exceedingly serious and so essential to any
well constituted man, to a well-constituted Briton in particular. The
British socialist is as much in love with "eternal truths" as is the
stiffest and most unregenerate of his bourgeois opponents. He
therefore toploftily declares that Mr. Shaw is an unbalanced person, a
licensed jester. Precisely the same resul