studies the variations of the market to introduce its tactic of strikes into the sinuosities of competition; or again a group of malcontents, for the most part social outcasts and little bourgeois, who give themselves up to speculations on socialism considered as one of the phases of political fashion. Social democracy has met all these impedimenta upon its way and it has been obliged to relieve itself of them as it will have to do again from one time to another. The art of persuasion does not always suffice. Oftener it was necessary and it is necessary to resign ourselves and wait until the hard school of disillusion serves to instruct, which it does better than reasonings can do. All these intrinsic difficulties of the proletarian movement, which the wily bourgeoisie oftener than not stirs up of itself and which it makes the most of, form a considerable part of the internal history of socialism during these last years. Socialism has not found impediments merely in the general conditions of economic competition and in the resistance of the political power, but also in the very conditions of the proletarian mass and in the mechanism sometimes obscure although inevitable of its slow, varied, complex movements, often antagonistic and contradictory. That prevents many people from seeing the increasing reduction of all class struggles to the single struggle between the capitalists and the proletarianized workers. Even as the Manifesto did not write, as the utopians did, the ethics and the psychology of the future society, just so it did not give the mechanism of that formation and of the development in which we find ourselves. It is surely enough that these few pioneers have opened the road. We must walk upon it to arrive at understanding and experience. Moreover man is distinctively the experimental animal; that is why he has a history, or rather that is why he makes his own history. Upon this road of contemporary socialism which constitutes its development because it is its experience, we have met the mass of the peasants. Socialism which at first kept itself practically and theoretically to the study and experience of the antagonisms between capitalists and proletarians in the circle of industrial production properly so called, has turned its activity toward that mass in which _peasant stupidity_ blossoms. To capture the peasants is the question of the hour, although the quintessential Schaeffle long ago mobilized the anti-collectivist brains of the peasants for the defense of the existing order. The elimination and the capture of domestic industry by capital, the passage more and more rapid of agrarian industry into the capitalist form, the disappearance of small proprietorship, or its lessening through mortgages, the disappearance of the communal domaines, usury, taxes and militarism, all this is beginning to work miracles even in those brains assumed to be props of the existing order.