ABSTRACT
The Communists have taken a big step in advance of us in giving effect to ideas which under a bourgeois system it must be admitted could be arrived at only over many generations. We judge them ruthless to the middle classes in the speed and drastic nature of their revolution; they judge us ruthless in the painful slowness of our evolution—ruthless, not to 45a minority in our society, but to the great majority represented by the ‘disendowed.’ The Communists deny, of course, that ours is even an ‘evolution’ towards the great common end of equality, of universal emancipation and of world peace; they see no end to the miseries of mankind but in such a culmination of them that a revolution like their own offers the only escape.
