What issue from this labyrinth have the economists discovered?
This last point deserves a moment's attention.
In primitive communism misery, as I have observed in a preceding
paragraph, is the universal condition.
Labor is war declared upon this misery.
Labor organizes itself, first by division, next by machinery,
then by competition, etc.
Now, the question is whether it is not in the essence of this
organization, as given us by political economy, at the same time
that it puts an end to the misery of some, to aggravate that of
others in a fatal and unavoidable manner. These are the terms in
which the question of pauperism must be stated, and for this
reason we have undertaken to solve it.
What means, then, this eternal babble of the economists about the
improvidence of laborers, their idleness, their want of dignity,
their ignorance, their debauchery, their early marriages, etc.?
All these vices and excesses are only the cloak of pauperism; but
the cause, the original cause which inexorably holds four-fifths
of the human race in disgrace,--what is it? Did not Nature make
all men equally gross, averse to labor, wanton, and wild? Did
not patrician and proletaire spring from the same clay? Then how
happens it that, after so many centuries, and in spite of so many
miracles of industry, science, and art, comfort and culture have
not become the inheritance of all? How happens it that in Paris
and London, centres of social wealth, poverty is as hideous as in
the days of Caesar and Agricola? Why, by the side of this
refined aristocracy, has the mass remained so uncultivated? It
is laid to the vices of the people: but the vices of the upper
class appear to be no less; perhaps they are even greater.
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