There may be
antagonism among manufacturers; but, in spite of them, social
action is one, convergent, harmonious,--in a word, personal.
Further, there is a day appointed for the creation of great
instruments of labor: it is the day when general consumption
shall be able to maintain their employment,--that is, for all
these propositions are interconvertible, the day when ambient
labor can feed new machinery. To anticipate the hour appointed
by the progress of labor would be to imitate the fool who, going
from Lyons to Marseilles, chartered a steamer for himself alone.
These points cleared up, nothing is easier than to explain why
labor must leave an excess for each producer.
And first, as regards society: Prometheus, emerging from the womb
of Nature, awakens to life in a state of inertia which is very
charming, but which would soon become misery and torture if he
did not make haste to abandon it for labor. In this original
idleness, the product of Prometheus being nothing, his well-being
is the same as that of the brute, and may be represented by zero.
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