Of all this accounts are only too
numerous; and, though we should rehearse forever our statistics
and our figures, we should always have before our eyes only
chaos,--chaos constant and uniform.
It is thought, indeed, that from the era of mythology to the
present year 57 of our great revolution, the general welfare has
improved: Christianity has long been regarded as the chief cause
of this amelioration, but now the economists claim all the honor
for their own principles. For after all, they say, what has been
the influence of Christianity upon society? Thoroughly utopian
at its birth, it has been able to maintain and extend itself only
by gradually adopting all the economic categories,--labor,
capital, farm-rent, usury, traffic, property; in short, by
consecrating the Roman law, the highest expression of political
economy.
Christianity, a stranger in its theological aspect to the
theories of production and consumption, has been to European
civilization what the trades-unions and free-masons were not long
since to itinerant workmen,--a sort of insurance company and
mutual aid society; in this respect, it owes nothing to political
economy, and the good which it has done cannot be invoked by the
latter in its own support.
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