As an Italian, I return so much the more willingly to these beginnings of modern socialism because for me, at least, this recent warning of Engels' is not without importance. "Thus the discovery that everywhere and always political conditions and events find their explanation in economic conditions would not have been made by Marx in 1845, but rather by Loria in 1886. He has at least succeeded in impressing this belief upon his compatriots, and since his book has appeared in French even upon some Frenchmen and he may now go on inflated with pride and vanity as if he had discovered an epoch-making historic theory until the Italian socialists have time to despoil the illustrious Mr. Loria of the peacock feathers which he has stolen."[19] I would willingly close here, but more remains to be said. On all sides and from all camps protests arise and objections are urged against historical materialism. And some times these voices are swelled here and there by newly converted socialists, socialists who are philosophical, socialists who are sentimental and sometimes hysterical. Then reappears, as a warning, the "question of the belly." Others devote themselves to exercise of logical gymnastics with abstract categories of egoism and altruism; for others again the inevitable struggle for existence always turns up at the right moment. Morality! But it is high time that we understand the lesson of this morality of the bourgeois epoch in the fable of the bees by Mandeville, who was contemporary with the first projection of classic economics. And has not the politics of this morality been explained in classic phrases that can never be forgotten by the first great political writer of the capitalist epoch Machiavelli, who did not invent Machiavellism, but who was its secretary and faithful and diligent editor. And as for the logical tourney between egoism and altruism, has it not been in full view from the time of the Reverend Malthus up to that empty, prolix and tiresome reasoner, the indispensable Spencer? Struggle for existence! But could you wish to observe, study and understand a struggle more important for us than the one which has its birth and is taking on gigantic proportions in the proletarian agitation? Perhaps you would reduce the explanation of this struggle which is developing and working in the supernatural domain of society, which man himself has created in the course of history, through his labor, through improved processes and through social institutions, and which man himself can change through other forms of labor, processes and institutions,--you would perhaps reduce it to the simple explanation of the more general struggle in which plant and animals, and men themselves in so far as they are animals, are contending in the bosom of nature. But let us return to our subject.