It has been amply demonstrated that the present society cannot be improved so long as the bases of organization are not transformed. Now, to reject the application of a new idea with the excuse that it has not been tested, is to reason in an absolutely unscientific fashion, for it would condemn humanity to utter immobility, new ideas being always more or less in contradiction with the ideas of the majority at a given time; and every time a new discovery is made it must be experimented upon to determine its value. If we had already had the experience, it would no longer be a new idea; it would already have struggled to obtain the necessary tests; it would be already prepared for admission into current practice. And besides, (it is a trifle vulgar and has been said a thousand times, but it is profoundly true) if one has the smallpox he does not seek to improve it but to get rid of it. We are dying of poverty and spoliation, we want to get rid of what is killing us; what worse can we get afterwards?
I know that at this point our opponents will drag out the “chestnut” of “compromising progress, the triumphs of science lost in the cataclysm, the human mind risking retrogression as the consequence of the victory of the masses, more corrupt and less learned than the class in power.” Further on we shall show the inaneness of such a fear, but let us for the moment accept the argument, such as it is; what weight can it have with those who suffer unjustly and are tired of suffering? What do progress and the marvels of industry matter to those who are considered to be no more than their instruments, without ever profiting by them? What do science and the discoveries of the human mind matter to those who suffer and to whom society refuses the means of developing their intelligence, if these must forever help to bind them faster in their slavery and brutishness? Go, then, and tell them that you greatly deplore the misery in which they are steeped; that you pity them, with all your heart, for the sufferings they undergo; but that their sudden enfranchisement involving the risk of a setback to the march of progress, it is imperative that the great mass continue to accept toil and suffering, in order that an inconsiderable minority of scholars—chosen from among another minority of parasitical possessors who absorb the product of all solely for their personal profit—may have the facilities for laboring at the solution of scientific problems! Have the courage of your convictions, and go and talk this to those who are starving or whose strength is exhausted in forced and protracted labors, and see what sort of a welcome you will get! In vain would you add that their patience will not be lost … to future generations, that the latter, in the long run, will reap the fruit of their ancestors’ abnegation … when they have succeeded in finding and applying useful reforms; the starving would answer you that they relinquished Christianity because it promised them a paradise only after death; you others cannot even promise that to their descendants, and they are tired of toiling and suffering for others; they want to enjoy the fruits of their pains and labors, not in their posterity, but right away!—And they are right.
If you do not want progress to be stranded, or the marvels of science to disappear, stop opposing the claims of the disinherited; instead of trying to prop up unhealthy and ruinous institutions, help us to clear the ground that no obstacle may irritate the popular wave, or seek to arrest it with stupid and unjust prejudice when it rushes to the assault of institutions which oppose it. Instead of ranging himself on the side of the defenders of the past, let whosoever thinks and really wants to work for the development of the human mind, array himself on the side of those who only ask to profit by their share of the happiness and light which they have helped to produce. Leave those who unjustly desire to monopolize all these joint products, the fruits of solidarity, to themselves; let these representatives of the past cling desperately to their stolen prerogatives, which evolution at every step shows to be unjust. Though you cannot thus avoid the cataclysm which their blind obstinacy makes inevitable, you may help to save from wreck those conquests of science which humanity could not, indeed, lose, without great damage. But know this: there are people who are suffering, dying of poverty, who can develop neither their bodies nor their minds, from whom all that which you fear may disappear has already been taken away; they are tired of being despoiled of it, they want to possess it also. Help them to get it; it will only be justice. This is the sole means of helping to preserve it. If you do not do this, blame nobody but yourselves and your own timorousness for the disasters which may follow the victory of the masses, if disasters there be.
Finally, as a last objection, we are told that, in spite of all, progress asserts itself; that the average level of the worker has been raised, that his intelligence has grown, his situation improved, his requirements have increased and found wherewith to be satisfied; that the law itself has evolved; the penal code gradually assuming a character plainly conformable to general utility. We shall review all these claims, and try to sift out what is really true in them.
It is evident that the moral level of the worker has been raised; his wants have increased with the facilities for satisfying them; nowadays he eats meat and drinks wine at every meal, which he did not do barely fifty years ago. But
