TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE. 
No apology is needed for bringing before English readers a 
translation of a work by so eminent a writer and so profound 
a thinker as M. de Laveleye, upon so important a question of 
the day as Socialism. The term Socialist is an exceedingly 
elastic one. It has been used to include a revolutionary 
anarchist, like Bakunin, who seeks to destroy, by any and 
every means, all States and all institutions, and to eradicate 
utterly the very idea of authority, as well as a constructive 
statesman of the conservative type, like Prince Bismarck, 
whose aim is to concentrate much power and many functions 
in the hands of a paternal government. There are Tory and 
Radical Socialists, State and Communal Socialists, Christian 
and Atheist Socialists, Socialists who are Collectivists, Com 
munists, or Anarchists, Socialists of the Chair, and “ Socialists 
of the Pothouse.” Other shades and subdivisions might 
easily be added, but under one or other of its numerous forms. 
Socialism is daily gaining fresh adherents in almost all civilized 
countries. 1 he recruits of even the more extreme sections 
are, moreover, no longer confined to the ranks of the unedu 
cated or the non-propertied classes. Even in England, among 
persons whom it would be misleading to call Socialists, there 
is an increasing dissatisfaction with our present industrial 
system, a growing feeling that the old principle of laissez faire