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SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT
It is possible to succeed in a manner in portraying to ourselves the life of past times: that is, our imaginations will show us a picture of them which may include such accurate information as we may have of them. But though this may be a vivid delineation, and though the information may be just, yet it will not be a picture of what really took place; it will be made up of the present which we experience, and the past which our imagination, drawing from our experience, conceives of—in short, it will be our picture of the past. If this be the case with the past, of which we have some concrete data, still more strongly may it be said of the future, of 288 which we have none, nothing but mere abstract deductions from historic evolution, the logical sequence of which may be interfered with at any point by elements whose force we have not duly appreciated; and these are abstractions also which are but the skeleton of the full life which will go on in those times to come.
Therefore, though we have no doubt of the transformation of modern civilisation into Socialism, yet we cannot foretell definitely what form the social life of the future will take, any more than a man living at the beginning of the commercial period, say Sir Thomas More or Lord Bacon, could foresee the state of society at the end of the nineteenth century.
Admitting that we are unable to realise positively the life of the future, in which the principle of real society will be universally accepted and