Just as the savage adores the fruit-tree, whose benefits he enjoys, for itself and not for the fruits it can yield, and, in the end, makes a fetish of it, an idol too holy to be touched and, therefore, barren; just as the miser who has learned in our individualist world the value of money, ends by adoring the money in itself and for itself, as a fetish and an idol, and keeps it buried in a safe where it remains sterile, instead of employing it as a means for procuring himself new pleasures; in the same way, the sincere liberal, the son of the French Revolution, has made Liberty an idol which is its own goal, a sterile fetish, instead of making use of it as an instrument for new conquests, for the realization of new ideals. It is understood that under a regime of political tyranny, the first and most urgent ideal was necessarily the conquest of liberty and of political sovereignty. And we who arrive upon the field after the battle is fought and the victory won, we gladly pay our tribute of gratitude for that conquest to all the martyrs and heroes who bought it at the price of their blood. But Liberty is not and can not be its own end and object! What is the liberty of holding public assemblages or the liberty of thought worth if the stomach has not its daily bread, and if millions of individuals have their moral strength paralyzed as a consequence of bodily or cerebral anemia? Of what worth is the theoretic share in political sovereignty, the right to vote, if the people remain enslaved by misery, lack of employment, and acute or chronic hunger? Liberty for liberty's sake--there you have the progress achieved turned into an obstacle to future progress; it is a sort of political masturbation, it is impotency face to face with the new necessities of life. Socialism, on the other hand, says that just as the subsequent phase of the social evolution does not efface the conquests of the preceding phases, neither does it wish to suppress the liberty so gloriously conquered, by the bourgeois world in 1789--but it does desire the laborers, after they have become conscious of the interests and needs of their class, to make use of that liberty to realize a more equitable and more human social organization. Nevertheless, it is only too indisputable that under the system of private property and its inevitable consequence, the monopoly of economic power, the liberty of the man who does not share in this monopoly, is only an impotent and sentimental toy. And when the workers, with a clear consciousness of their class-interests, wish to make use of this liberty, then the holders of political power are forced to disown the great liberal principles, "the principles of '89," by suppressing all public liberty, and they vainly fancy that they will be able, in this way, to stop the inevitable march of human evolution.