This defect is what Federalism claims to supply. It claims to be the only theory that abandons abstractions and keeps closely to the nature of things, and therefore to be the only theory that is able to realize even approximately the Christian principle of equality of right. The name furnishes no very precise clue to the conclusion it designates, and it has no reference to the federative form of State, for which Marlo expressly disavows having any partiality. He has chosen the word merely to indicate the fact that society is an organic confederation of many different kinds of associations--families, churches, academies, mercantile companies, and so on; that association is not only a natural form, but the natural form in which man's activity tends to be carried on; and that in any sound system of industrial right this must be recognised by an extension of the collective form of property and the co-operative form of production. Communism, says Marlo, is mechanical, Liberalism is atomistic, but Federalism is organic. When he distinguishes his theory from communism, it must be remembered that it is from the communism which he has criticised, and which he would prefer to denominate Equalism; it is from the communism of Baboeuf, which would out of hand give every man according to his needs, and would consequently, through impairing the motives to industry, leave those needs themselves in the long run less satisfactorily provided for than they are now. But his system is nearly identical with the communism of the Young Hegelians of his own time--that is, with the German socialism of the present day--although he arrived at it in entire independence of their agitations, and builds it on deductions peculiar to himself. Like them, he asks for the compulsory transformation of land and the instruments of production from private property into collective property; like them, he asks for this on grounds of social justice, as the necessary mechanism for giving effect to positive rights that are set aside under the present system; and he says himself, "If you ask the question, how is the democratic social republic related to Federalism, the most suitable answer is, as the riddle to its solution."