40

THE  SOCIALISM  OF  TO-DAY.

demonstrate  dry  abstractions.  They  lack  the  great  spiritual
breath  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries.  They
never  invoke,  like  the  heroes  of  the  Reformation  or  of  the  French
Revolution,  those  great  principles  of  truth,  right,  and  justice
which  touch  the  hearts  of  men.  It  is  not  by  splitting  hairs
with  dialectics,  razor-sharp  though  they  be,  that  the  way  is  to
be  prepared  for  a  social  transformation.
Bound  to  the  earth  by  their  materialistic  doctrines,  they
present  us  with  no  ideal  to  be  realized.  All  that  exists  is,  for
them,  the  result  of  necessary  laws  which  govern  human
societies  as  immutably  as  celestial  bodies.  The  French
Socialists  are  often  ignorant,  simple,  and  tricked  by  their  own
fancies.  Proudhon  himself,  in  spite  of  his  vigour  of  mind,  had
received  only  an  incomplete  and  ill-digested  education.  But
they  are  all  human  ;  they  dream  of  universal  happiness  in  their
own  way.  They  are,  in  fact,  mistaken  philanthropists.  In  spite
of  their  errors,  or  even  their  insanities,  they  have  a  noble  aim  :
to  bring  about  the  reign  of  brotherhood  among  men.  They
are  Utopian  dreamers  who  have  always  condemned  the  violent
acts  of  the  Jacobins,  which  the  German  Socialists,  dry  and
hard  as  a  syllogism,  are  ready  to  renew.
How  superior  is  Christianity,  considered  merely  from  the
point  of  view  of  a  social  reform,  to  all  these  systems,  in  which
either  true  charity  or  a  just  appreciation  of  facts  is  wanting  !
An  infinite  tenderness  for  the  oppressed  pervades  the  Gospel,
together  with  a  sublime  sentiment  of  social  justice.  The
essential  truth  which  rises  from  the  whole  teaching  of  Christ  is
that  no  improvement  is  possible  without  first  making  man  himself ­
  better.  Moral  renovation  !  There  is  the  source  of  all  true
progress.  It  is  not  by  the  criticism  of  economic  doctrines,
however  keen  it  may  be,  nor  by  a  new  form  of  association,  be
it  phalanstery  or  co-operative  society,  that  we  shall  heal  the
maladies  of  the  existing  social  system.
It  was  by  spreading  throughout  all  ranks  of  society  more
light  and  a  higher  morality  that  Christianity  burst  the  bonds  of
slavery.  It  will  be  through  the  same  moral  influences  that
poverty  will  cease.  No  doubt,  “  the  poor  shall  we  always  have
with  us,”  because  there  will  always  be  some  incorrigibly  idle