Now, as long as the wage-worker gets no profit save
what may be allowed him by the contractor, it is perfectly safe
to assume that eternal poverty will be his lot: it is not in the
power of the holders of labor to make it otherwise.
For the rest, the idea, otherwise very laudable, of associating
workmen with employers tends to this communistic conclusion,
evidently false in its premises: The last word of machinery is to
make man rich and happy without the necessity of labor on his
part. Since, then, natural agencies must do everything for us,
machinery ought to belong to the State, and the goal of progress
is communism.
I shall examine the communistic theory in its place.
But I believe that I ought to immediately warn the partisans of
this utopia that the hope with which they flatter themselves in
relation to machinery is only an illusion of the economists,
something like perpetual motion, which is always sought and never
found, because asked of a power which cannot give it. Machines
do not go all alone: to keep them in motion it is necessary to
organize an immense service around them; so that in the end, man
creating for himself an amount of work proportional to the number
of instruments with which he surrounds himself, the principal
consideration in the matter of machinery is much less to divide
its products than to see that it is fed,--that is, to continually
renew the motive power.
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