dicates exactly its degree of utility, and marks its relation of proportion to the demand and, by consequence, to the total mass of wealth. In this case, if a product is sold at a price equal to its cost of production, supply and demand always equalise themselves; since the cost of production is deemed to express the true relation of supply and demand.
Practically M. Proudhon sets himself to prove that the labor-time necessary to create a product marks its exact proportion to existing wants, in such sort that the things of which the production costs the least time are those things which are the most immediately useful, and so on, gradually. The production of an article of luxury in itself proves, according to this doctrine, that society has sufficient leisure to permit it to satisfy a desire for luxury.
The very proof of his thesis M. Proudhon finds in the observation that the things the most useful cost the least time to produce, that society commences always by the most simple industries, and that it successively "attacks the production of objects which cost more labor time, and which correspond to wants of a higher order."
M. Proudhon borrows from M. Dunoyer the example of extractive industry—gathering wild fruit, pasturage, the chase, fishing, &c.—which represents the most simple form of industry, the least costly, and by which man commenced "the first day of his second creation." The first day of his first creation is enshrined in Genesis, which shows us God as the first industrial of the world.
Things go quite otherwise than as M. Proudhon thinks. From the very moment in which civilisation begins production commences to be based on the antagonism of
