This is the way the system of private property works, and these are the consequences it produces, without any regard to the wills or wishes of individuals. Therefore, every attempt made against such or such an individual is condemned to remain barren of results; it is the ruling tendency of Society, the objective point which must be changed, it is private ownership which must be abolished, not by a _partition_ ("dividing up"), which would result in the most extreme and pernicious form of private ownership, since by the end of a year the persistence of the old individualist principle would restore the _status quo ante_, and all the advantage would accrue solely to the most crafty and the least scrupulous. Our aim must be the abolition of private ownership and the establishment of collective and social ownership in land and the means of production. This substitution cannot be the subject for a decree,--though the intention to effect it by a decree is attributed to us--but it is in course of accomplishment under our eyes, every day, from hour to hour, directly or indirectly. Directly, because civilization shows us the continuous substitution of public ownership and social functions for private ownership and individual functions. Roads, postal systems, railways, museums, city lighting-plants, water-plants, schools, etc., which were only a few years since private properties and functions, have become social properties and functions. And it would be absurd to imagine that this direct process of socialization is destined to come to a halt to-day, instead of becoming progressively more and more marked, in accordance with every tendency of our modern life. Indirectly, since it is the outcome toward which the economic individualism of the bourgeoisie tends. The bourgeois class, which takes its name from the dwellers in the _bourgs_ (towns) which the feudal chateau and the Church--symbols of the class then dominant--protected, is the result of fecund labor intelligently directed toward its goal and of historical conditions which have changed the economic structure and tendency of the world (the discovery of America, for instance). This class achieved its revolution in the end of the eighteenth century, and conquered the political power. In the history of the civilized world, it has inscribed a page in letters of gold by those wondrous developments in the lives of nations that are truly epic in character, and by its marvelous applications of science to industry ... but it is now traversing the downward branch of the parabola, and symptoms are appearing which announce to us--and offer proof of their announcement--its dissolution; without its disappearance, moreover, the advent and establishment of a new social phase would be impossible.