In short, it is impossible, contradictory, in the present system
of society, for the proletariat to secure well-being through
education or education through well-being. For, without
considering the fact that the proletaire, a human machine, is as
unfit for comfort as for education, it is demonstrated, on the
one hand, that his wages continually tend to go down rather than
up, and, on the other, that the cultivation of his mind, if it
were possible, would be useless to him; so that he always
inclines towards barbarism and misery. Everything that has been
attempted of late years in France and England with a view to the
amelioration of the condition of the poor in the matters of the
labor of women and children and of primary instruction, unless it
was the fruit of some hidden thought of radicalism, has been done
contrary to economic ideas and to the prejudice of the
established order. Progress, to the mass of laborers, is always
the book sealed with the seven seals; and it is not by
legislative misconstructions that the relentless enigma will be
solved.
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