Chevalier asks professional
schools.
Perhaps it will be said that, the mass of transportation having
increased in much greater proportion than the number of
day-laborers, the difference is to the advantage of the railway,
and that, all things considered, there is progress. The
observation may even be generalized and the same argument applied
to all industries.
But it is precisely out of this generality of the phenomenon that
springs the subjection of laborers. Machinery plays the leading
role in industry, man is secondary: all the genius displayed by
labor tends to the degradation of the proletariat. What a
glorious nation will be ours when, among forty millions of
inhabitants, it shall count thirty-five millions of drudges,
paper-scratchers, and flunkies!
With machinery and the workshop, divine right--that is, the
principle of authority--makes its entrance into political
economy. Capital, Mastership, Privilege, Monopoly, Loaning,
Credit, Property, etc.,--such are, in economic language, the
various names of I know not what, but which is otherwise called
Power, Authority, Sovereignty, Written Law, Revelation, Religion,
God in short, cause and principle of all our miseries and all our
crimes, and who, the more we try to define him, the more eludes
us.
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