There is nothing and nobody but itself. Its
dogma is equality, its prophet is Mably, and Baboeuf is its god.
[Footnote: Mably, the Abbe Mably, 1709-85, one of the precursors of the
revolution, the professor of a cultivated and classical communism based
on a study of antiquity, which Babeuf and others like him, in the
following generation, translated into practical experiment. "Caius
Gracchus" Babeuf, born 1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a conspiracy
against the Directory, is sometimes called the first French socialist.
Perhaps socialist doctrines, properly so called, may be said to make
their first entry into the region of popular debate and practical
agitation with his "Manifeste des Egaux," issued April 1796.]
How is the conflict to be solved, since there is no longer one single
common principle between the partisans and the enemies of the existing
form of society, between liberalism and the worship of equality? Their
respective notions of man, duty, happiness--that is to say, of life and
its end--differ radically. I suspect that the communism of the
_Internationale_ is merely the pioneer of Russian nihilism, which will
be the common grave of the old races and the servile races, the Latins
and the Slavs. If so, the salvation of humanity will depend upon
individualism of the brutal American sort.
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