where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant population, rather compensate for the relative scarcity of heads and hands; and, finally, where the feverishly youthful life of material production, which has to appropriate a new world to itself, has so far left neither time nor opportunity to abolish the illusions of old. [#3 This was written at the beginning of 1852.]
All classes and parties joined hands in the June days in a “Party of Order” against the class of the proletariat, which was designated as the “Party of Anarchy,” of Socialism, of Communism. They claimed to have “saved” society against the “enemies of society.” They gave out the slogans of the old social order—“Property, Family, Religion, Order”—as the passwords for their army, and cried out to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou wilt conquer!” From that moment on, so soon as any of the numerous parties, which had marshaled themselves under this sign against the June insurgents, tries, in turn, to take the revolutionary field in the interest of its own class, it goes down in its turn before the cry: “Property, Family, Religion, Order.” Thus it happens that “society is saved” as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an “assault upon society,” and is branded as “Socialism.” Finally the High Priests of “Religion and Order” themselves are kicked off their tripods; are fetched out of their beds in the dark; hurried into patrol wagons, thrust into jail or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pen is broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of Religion, of Family, of Property, and of Order.