Small industrial employers, artisans, retail merchants and working owners of small farms have two-fold class-ties. They belong to the possessing class, and yet they are exploited. When, under the empire of a naive pride and vain hopes, the man proud of his possessions, the would-be capitalist, dominates in them, they give heed to the dirty blackguards who are forever telling them that the common laborer and the socialist wish to take their little property away from them, and they show a hostility which, in spite of their conservative intentions, is aimed against those whom they ought to help if they wish to be sure of retaining the little property they have. When, under the lashes of the thong of stern reality they feel themselves exploited and menaced with expropriation, they applaud the demands of the socialists and help support--as has often been seen--the strikes of the laborers. According to circumstances the middle class declares itself in this way, now on one side, now on the other. The industrial workingmen who own nothing but their labor-power and to whom the possession, even in a dream, of the smallest estate is an impossibility, cannot possibly conceive the false idea that they have anything to lose by the victory of socialism. From that to thinking that they have everything to gain by that victory is not far; for this all that is needed is for them to be brought into contact with the socialist propaganda. Therefore the principal mission of socialism is to instruct and organize the multitudes of industrial laborers; they must be won over the first of all. This which is, in fact, for the middle class only a defensive war against the great capitalists becomes an offensive war for the great majority of the industrial laborers who have to conquer that which the middle class has only to preserve. Because we say that socialism makes its appeal more particularly to the industrial laborers, we beg our critics not to represent us as saying that socialism ought to neglect the members of all other classes. Socialism struggling for the emancipation--no longer impossible--of all, combats in every rank or stratum of society all exploitations and all oppressions, and it is the natural defender of all the exploited and all the oppressed. Just as, to regard the economic question as the sum and substance of militant socialism is not, in our opinion, to restrict its field of action, but is simply, on the contrary, to pursue directly the only line of conduct by which it is possible for its efforts to produce broad general effects, so to devote our attention first of all to the industrial laborers is not to make light of the wrongs of the other victims of exploitation, but it is to devote our first efforts to strengthening the active army of socialism, formed of those who have to blaze out a path for the movement, but whose success--which will be hastened by the support of members of other classes--will assure the emancipation of all. FOOTNOTES: