Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/250

to acknowledge themselves to be in theory. Theoretically, they remain Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans; practically, they are citizens of the world, and, like the world, their country has no boundaries. In their fatuity, they ignore that, when all boundaries are removed, there is no longer a country; and where there is no country there are no men, except, indeed, they may happen to be socialists.

Among parties who combat for supremacy, the victory belongs, of right, to the most logical. This ought to be so in principle, and is so in fact, as is proved by a universal and constant experience. Humanly speaking, Catholicism, owes its success to the soundness of its logic, and, if it were not led by the hand of God, its logic would suffice to make it triumph even to the remotest corners of the world. This will more clearly appear in the following chapter.

The liberal school, as we have demonstrated in the preceding chapter, has established the premises from which are drawn socialist deductions; and the socialist schools have only drawn the consequences that result from the premises of the liberal school. The two schools are not distinguished by their respective ideas, but by the greater or less degree of boldness with which they proclaim them. The question between them being thus