veniences of the law of division, but have insisted very much more on the first than on the second, because that better served their optimism, and without any one of them ever asking himself what could be the inconveniences of a law..... How could the same principle, pursued rigorously to its consequences, conduct to effects diametrically opposed? No single economist, either before or since Adam Smith, has done more than perceive that there was a problem to solve. Say only goes so far as to recognise that in the division of labor the same cause which produces the good engenders the evil."
Adam Smith goes farther than M. Proudhon thinks he does. He has clearly seen that "in reality the difference of natural talents between individuals is much less than is supposed. These dispositions so different, which seem to distinguish the men of different professions when they arrive at mature age, are not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor." In principle a porter differs less from a philosopher than a mastiff from a greyhound. It is the division of labor which has placed an abyss between the two. All this does not prevent M. Proudhon from saying, in another place, that Adam Smith had no doubt of the inconveniences produced by the division of labor. It is still this which makes him say that J. B. Say was the first to recognise "that in the division of labor the same cause which produces the good engenders the evil."
But let us hear Lemontey: suum cuique. "M. J. B. Say has done me the honor of adopting in his excellent treatise on political economy the principle which I brought to light in this fragment on the moral influence of the division of labor. The somewhat frivolous title of my book has doubtless precluded him from citing me.
