Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/198

where it incidentally exists, without any reference to the individuals through whom it originally and essentially exists. According to the second supposition, society has a self-sustaining, concrete, individual, and necessary existence. Those who assert this must satisfactorily solve the same questions that the rationalists propose to the Catholics respecting man: that is, whether society is essentially or accidentally evil. If we assume the first, how is essential evil to be explained? If the second, how, in what way, under what circumstances, and upon what occasion has the social harmony been disturbed by these incidental perturbations? We have already seen how the Catholics unravel these complications, with what success they solve all these difficulties, and in what manner they answer all these questions respecting the existence of evil, considered as a consequence of the human prevarication. That which we have not yet seen, and which we shall never see, is the success of socialist rationalism in solving these same questions respecting the existence of evil, considered as existing only in social institutions.

This single reason would be sufficient to authorize the assertion, that the socialist theory is that of charlatans, and socialism only the social reason of a set of clowns. Not to exceed the strict limits within which I have proposed to confine myself, I will close this discussion by presenting this dilemma for a socialist solution. According to socialist doctrine, the evil which exists in society is either essential or accidental. If it is essential, it is not sufficient, in order to eradicate it, to overthrow social institutions; but it is likewise necessary to destroy society itself, since this is the essence which produces evil in its various forms. But, if social evil is