These few, driven by sympathetic pain, will
seek, first in thought and then in action, for some
way of escape, some new system of society by which
life may become richer, more full of joy and less
full of preventable evils than it is at present. But
in the past such men have, as a rule, failed to interest
the very victims of the injustices which they wished
to remedy. The more unfortunate sections of the
population have been ignorant, apathetic from excess
of toil and weariness, timorous through the imminent
danger of immediate punishment by the holders of
power, and morally unreliable owing to the loss of
self-respect resulting from their degradation. To
create among such classes any conscious, deliberate
effort after general amelioration might have seemed
a hopeless task, and indeed in the past it has
generally proved so. But the modern world, by the
increase of education and the rise in the standard of
comfort among wage-earners, has produced new
conditions, more favorable than ever before to the
demand for radical reconstruction. It is above all
the Socialists, and in a lesser degree the Anarchists
(chiefly as the inspirers of Syndicalism), who have
become the exponents of this demand.
What is perhaps most remarkable in regard to
both Socialism and Anarchism is the association of a
widespread popular movement with ideals for a better
world.
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