truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and
potato spirits.

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord,
so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist
tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property,
against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the
place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification
of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian
Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates
the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.


B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by
the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence
pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society.
The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were
the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries
which are but little developed, industrially and commercially,
these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising
bourgeoisie.

In countries where modern civilisation has become fully
developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed,
fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing
itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The