160 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
shall be guaranteed to everybody: immediately an im- mense relaxation would succeed to the ardent tension of industry.”
In the place of a supposition, an affirmation, and a negation, we have now an ordinance, which M. Proudhon gives expressly in order to prove the necessity of com- petition, its eternity as a category, &c.
If people were to suppose that it only requires an ordinance to escape from competition, they would never escape from it. And to go so far as to propose the aboli- tion of competition while retaining the wage system is to propose to make nonsense by a royal decree. But the peoples do not proceed by royal decree. Before making these ordinances they have at least to change, from top to bottom, their industrial and political conditions of existence, and, in consequence, all their manner of being.
M. Proudhon would answer with his imperturbable assurance that this is the hypothesis “of a transforma- tion of our nature without historical precedent,” and that he would have the right to “put us outside the dis- cussion” in virtue of we know not what ordinance.
M. Proudhon does not know that the whole of history is nothing but a continual transformation of human nature.
“Let us keep to facts. The French Revolution was made for industrial as well as for political liberty ; and, although France, in 1789, may not have recognised all the consequences of the principle, the realisation of which she demanded, we may say frankly she was not deceived either in her desires or in her attempt. Whoever should attempt to deny this would in my opinion lose the right of criticism. I will never dispute with an adversary who would lay down as a principle that 25,000,000 of
