Now the first attempts that society made to effect this adjustment were not unnaturally attended with imperfection. In the warmth of their recoil from the evils of monopolism, men ran into extreme and distorted embodiments of the opposite principle, and they ran contrary ways. These contrary ways are Liberalism and Communism. Liberalism fixed its attention mainly on the artificial restrictions, the privileges, the services, the legal bonds by which monopoly and inequality were kept up, and it thought a perfect state of society would be brought about if only every chain were snapped and every fetter stripped away. It conceived the road to the greatest possible happiness for every man was the greatest possible freedom; it idolized the principle of abstract liberty, and it fancied if evil did not disappear, it was always because something still remained that needed emancipation. Communism, on the other hand, kept its eyes on the inequalities of monopolistic society; imagined the true road to the greatest possible happiness was the greatest possible equality; that all ills would vanish as soon as things were levelled enough; in short, it idolized the principle of abstract equality. Modern Liberalism and modern Communism are therefore of equal birth; they have the same historical origin in the triumph of the principle of equality of right in 1789; they are only different modes of attempting to reduce that principle to practice; and Liberalism happens to be the more widely disseminated of the two, not because it represents that principle better, but merely because being more purely negative than the other, it was easier of introduction, and so got the start of Communism in the struggle of existence. According to Marlo, they are both equally bad representatives of the principle, and their chief good lies in their mutual criticism, by means of which they prepare the way for the true system, the system of Federalism, which will be presently explained. The history of revolution, he says, begins in the victory of Liberalism and Communism together over Monopolism; it proceeds by the conflict of the victors with one another, and it ends in the final triumph of Federalism over both.