He can only tell the general lines of the future evolution of that individual, and must leave it to time to show the exact character of all the particular details of its personality, which will be developed naturally and spontaneously, in conformity with the hereditary organic conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live.

This is what can be and what must be the reply of every socialist.  This is the position taken by Bebel in the German Reichstag[63] in his reply to those who wish to know at the present time what all the details of the future State will be, and who skilfully profiting by the ingenuity of the socialist romancers, criticize their artificial fantasies which are true in their general outlines, but arbitrary in their details.

It would have been just the same thing if, before the French Revolution,—­which, as it were, hatched out the bourgeois world, prepared and matured during the previous evolution,—­the nobility and the clergy, the classes then in power, had asked the representatives of the Third Estate—­bourgeois by birth, though some aristocrats or priests embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their caste, as the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbe Sieyes—­“But what sort of a world will this new world of yours be?  Show us first its exact plan, and after that we will decide!”

The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would not have been able to answer this question, because it was impossible for them to foresee what the human society of the nineteenth century was to be.  But this did not prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place because it represented the next natural and inevitable phase of an eternal evolution.  This is now the position of socialism with relation to the bourgeois world.  And if this bourgeois world, born only about a century ago, is destined to have a much shorter historical cycle than the feudal (aristocratico-clerical) world, this is simply because the marvelous scientific progress of the nineteenth century has increased a hundred-fold the rapidity of life in time and has nearly annihilated space, and, therefore, civilized humanity traverses now in ten years the same road that it took, in the Middle Ages, a century or two to travel.

The continuously accelerated velocity of human evolution is also one of the laws established and proved by modern social science.

It is the artificial constructions of sentimental socialism which have given birth to the idea—­correct so far as they are concerned—­that socialism is synonymous with tyranny.

It is evident that if the new social organization is not the spontaneous form naturally produced by the human evolution, but rather an artificial construction that has issued complete in every detail from the brain of some social architect, the latter will be unable to avoid regulating the new social machinery by an infinite number of rules and by the superior authority which he will assign to a controlling intelligence, either individual or collective.  It is easy to understand then, how such an organization gives rise in its opponents—­who see in the individualist world only the advantages of liberty, and who forget the evils which so copiously flow from it—­the impression of a system of monastic or military discipline.[64]