The difference in the character of the economic monopoly may cause, it is true, a certain diversity of political _color_, and I have always contended that the great landed proprietors represent the conservative tendencies of political stagnation, while the holders of financial or industrial capital represent in many instances the progressive party, driven by its own nature to petty innovations of form, while finally those who possess only an intellectual capital, the liberal professions, etc., may go to the extreme length of political radicalism. On the vital question--that is to say on the economic question of property--conservatives, progressives and radicals are all individualists. On this point they are all, in their essential nature of the same social class and, in spite of certain sentimental sympathies, the adversaries of the working class and of those who, although born on _the other shore_, have embraced the political programme of that class, a programme necessarily corresponding to the primordial economic necessity--that is to say, the socialization of the land and the means of production with all the innumerable and radical moral, juridical and political transformations, which this socialization will inevitably bring to pass in the social world. This is why contemporary political life cannot but degenerate into the most sterile _bysantinisme_ and the most corrupt strife for bribes and spoils, when it is confined to the superficial skirmishes between individualist parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal names, but whose ideas are so similar that one often sees radicals and progressives less modern than many conservatives. There will be a new birth of political life only with the development of the socialist party, because, after the disappearance from the political stage of the historical figures of the patriots (the founders of modern Italy) and of the personal reasons which split up the representatives into different political groups, the formation of one single individualist party will become necessary, as I declared in the Italian Chamber on the 20th of December, 1893. The historical duel will then be begun, and the Class Struggle will then display on the field of politics all its beneficent influence. Beneficent, I say, because the class struggle must be understood not in the contemptible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of malevolence and personal violence, but must be worthily conceived as a great social drama. With all my heart I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress of civilization, without bloody convulsions, but historical destiny has decreed the conflict, and it is not given to us or to others to avert or postpone it.