Gustav Le Bon's Prediction About Socialism

From The Crowd, keep in mind he was writing in 1895.

[T]he evident weakness of socialist beliefs today will not prevent them triumphing among the masses. Their real inferiority to all religious beliefs is solely the result of this consideration, that the ideal of happiness offered by the latter being realizable only in a future life, it was beyond the power of anybody to contest it. The socialist ideal of happiness being intended to be realized on earth, the vanity of its promises will at once appear as soon as the first efforts towards their realization are made, and simultaneously the new belief will entirely lose its prestige. Its strength, in consequence, will only increase until the day when, having triumphed, its practical realization shall commence. For this reason, while the new religion exerts to begin with, like all those that have preceded it, a destructive influence, it will be unable, in the future, to play a creative part.