Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/253

generation there should be a corresponding change in the names of families and nations. That this deduction presents a conclusion which is both ludicrous and absurd no one can deny, but the grotesque and absurd are the logical consequences of the principle announced by the socialists; and this is precisely what we have undertaken to demonstrate. It only then remains for socialism to choose the manner of its death, as between the illogical and the absurd.

The socialist schools have had no difficulty in proving that if the liberal school rejects a domestic, political, and religious solidarity, it must also deny the solidarity of the nation and of the monarchy; and that they ought of necessity to suppress in the national common law the institution of the monarchy, and in the international common law the constitutive differences of nations. But the socialist schools, with an inconsistency beyond that of the liberal school, (absurd and contradictory as this school is,) afterward acknowledge the highest, most universal, and most inconceivable, humanly speaking, of all solidarities, that is to say, the solidarity of humanity. The motto of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as the common patrimony of all men, either signifies nothing, or it means that there is a solidarity in humanity. The recognition of this solidarity, separated from the others, and from the religious dogma which teaches and expounds it, is an act of faith so supernatural and entire, that I cannot even conceive of it, accustomed as I am, being a Catholic, to believe what I do not understand.

To believe in the equality of all men, when I see them all unequal; to believe in the existence of liberty, when I behold servitude everywhere established; to believe that all men are brothers, when history teaches me that