Instead of that, you know nothing but the continual substitution
of the good pleasure of the prince for your theories, the arrest
of the course of economic law by arbitrary power, and, under the
pretext of equity, the deception of the wage worker and the
monopolist alike! Your liberty is but a half-liberty, your
justice but a half-justice, and all your wisdom consists in those
middle terms whose iniquity is always twofold, since they justify
the pretensions of neither one party nor the other! No, such
cannot be the science which you have promised us, and which, by
unveiling for us the secrets of the production and consumption of
wealth, must unequivocally solve the social antinomies. Your
semi- liberal doctrine is the code of despotism, and shows that
you are powerless to advance as well as ashamed to retreat.
If society, pledged by its economic antecedents, can never
retrace its steps; if, until the arrival of the universal
equation, monopoly must be maintained in its possession,--no
change is possible in the laying of taxes: only there is a
contradiction here, which, like every other, must be pushed till
exhausted.
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