proletariat that is serving its apprenticeship in struggle. It would be impossible for us to exercise any direct influence on such a work of formation.
We may play a useful part if we limit ourselves to attacking middle-class thought in such a way as to put the proletariat on its guard against an invasion of ideas and customs from the hostile class.
Men who have received an elementary education are generally imbued with a certain reverence for print as such, and they readily attribute genius to the people who attract the attention of the literary world to any great extent; they imagine that they must have a great deal to learn from authors whose names are so often mentioned with praise in the newspapers; they listen with singular respect to the commentaries that these literary prizewinners present to them. It is not easy to fight against these prejudices, but it is a very useful work; we regard this task as being absolutely of the first importance, and we can carry it to a profitable conclusion without ever attempting to direct the working-class movement. The proletariat must be preserved from the experience of the Germans who conquered the Roman Empire; the latter were ashamed of being barbarians, and put themselves to school with the rhetoricians of the Latin decadence; they had no reason to congratulate themselves for having wished to be civilised.
In the course of my career I have touched on many subjects which might be considered to be outside the proper range of a Socialist writer. I have endeavoured to show that the science whose marvellous results the middle class constantly boasts of is not as infallible as those who live by its exploitation would have us believe; and that a study of the phenomena of the Socialist world would often furnish philosophers with an enlightenment which they do not find in the works of the learned. I do not believe, then, that I am labouring in vain, for in this
