Whatever be the difficulties of the first of these two forms of
Socialism, the second must evidently involve the same difficulties and
many more. The former, too, has the great advantage that it can be
brought into operation progressively, and can prove its capabilities
by trial. It can be tried first on a select population and extended to
others as their education and cultivation permit. It need not, and in
the natural order of things would not, become an engine of subversion
until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of
reconstruction. It is not so with the other: the aim of that is to
substitute the new rule for the old at a single stroke, and to
exchange the amount of good realised under the present system, and its
large possibilities of improvement, for a plunge without any
preparation into the most extreme form of the problem of carrying on
the whole round of the operations of social life without the motive
power which has always hitherto worked the social machinery. It must
be acknowledged that those who would play this game on the strength of
their own private opinion, unconfirmed as yet by any experimental
verification--who would forcibly deprive all who have now a
comfortable physical existence of their only present means of
preserving it, and would brave the frightful bloodshed and misery that
would ensue if the attempt was resisted--must have a serene confidence
in their own wisdom on the one hand and a recklessness of other
people's sufferings on the other, which Robespierre and St. Just,
hitherto the typical instances of those united attributes, scarcely
came up to. Nevertheless this scheme has great elements of popularity
which the more cautious and reasonable form of Socialism has not;
because what it professes to do it promises to do quickly, and holds
out hope to the enthusiastic of seeing the whole of their aspirations
realised in their own time and at a blow.
The peculiarities, however, of the revolutionary form of Socialism
will be most conveniently examined after the considerations common to
both the forms have been duly weighed.