Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

century, the precursors of the revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that existed. A rational state and a rational society were to be established; everything that contradicted eternal reason was to be removed without mercy. We have also seen that this eternal reason was, in reality, nothing other than the idealized intellect of the middle-class citizen who was just then developing into the bourgeois. When the French Revolution had finally realized this rational society and this state of reason, the new institutions, however rational they appeared compared to earlier conditions, by no means proved to be absolutely rational. The state of reason had completely broken down. The Rousseauian social contract had found its realization during the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, having lost faith in its own political capacity, had fled first into the corruption of the Directory and finally under the protection of Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace had turned into an endless war of conquest. The rational society had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general well-being, had been sharpened by the removal of the guild and other privileges that had bridged it, and the religious charitable institutions that had mitigated it. The "freedom of property" from feudal shackles, which had now become reality, proved for the small bourgeois and small peasant to be the freedom to sell this small property, crushed by the overwhelming competition of large capital and large landed estates, to these very great lords, and thus for the small bourgeois and small peasant, it transformed into freedom from property. The upswing of industry on a capitalist basis raised the poverty and misery of the working masses to a condition of society. Monetary payment became more and more, in Carlyle's expression, the sole link of society. The number of crimes increased from year to year. If the feudal vices, which formerly paraded in broad daylight, were not destroyed, they were at least temporarily pushed into the background, while in their place, the bourgeois vices, hitherto nurtured only in silence, blossomed all the more luxuriantly. Trade developed more and more into swindling. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and envy of the competitive struggle. In place of violent oppression came corruption; in place of the sword as the primary social lever of power, came money. The right of the first night passed from the feudal lords to the bourgeois factory owners. Prostitution spread to an unprecedented extent. Marriage itself remained, as before,