Let us call to mind, that very many writers have made the prosperity of nations to consist in the multiplicity of their wants—in the ever augmenting diversity of their material enjoyments—in an immense industry—in an unlimited commerce—in the rapid circulation of the monied metals and (as the last step of the analysis) in the restlessness and insatiable cupidity of the population.[1] At one time they prefer the heaping together of territorial property, at another, they declare for the multiplication of small proprietorships; and whilst some have believed that the misery and brutalization of the productive classes are essential to the opulence and tranquillity of the whole, others, by holding forth the unrestricted and unlimited freedom of industry and commercial transactions, as a means of remedying the established inequality, have only paved the way for a new system of corruption, and for new inequalities, more extensive and pernicious than what before existed. For, once the happiness and strength of society were placed in riches, it became a necessary consequence to debar from the exercise of political rights all the citizens who do not offer by their fortunes a guarantee or pledge of attachment to such an order of things—an order reputed, as it were, the perfection of the social state. In all social systems of this kind, the great majority of the citizens being incessantly subjected to painful drudgery are, in effect, condemned to languish all their days in misery, ignorance, and slavery.[2]
- ↑ It was always difficult for men to understand one another, with a view to the establishing of a rational social order. It was by a traffic in superfluities, and by the arts of luxury, that our forefathers, snatched without violence a part of their riches from the favoured sons of feudality. Slaves, by thus becoming necessary to their masters, enfeebled their power. An evil which served as a cure for another evil, was taken for the supreme good at the point, where, in the eyes of many, liberty is but another name for the unlimited faculty of acquiring and accumulating.
- ↑ From the vast disproportion between the numerically large class of labourers (salariés) and the comparatively small class of capitalists (salarians), must necessarily result the misery of the former. Overcharged as they are with labour, their ignorance becomes as much a matter of necessity to themselves, as it is a necessary safeguard to their taskmasters, who would have every thing to fear from their knowledge, in consequence of having thrown upon them their own proper share of the general burdens. From ignorance and misery arises the slavery of our country, which exists wherever men want the power or the knowledge to exercise their volition.
