Yes, an absurd supposition, but a very
real supposition, and one which you must admit precisely because
it is absurd. In France a standing army of five hundred thousand
men, forty thousand priests, twenty thousand doctors, eighty
thousand lawyers, and I know not how many hundred thousand other
nonproducers of every sort, constitute an immense market for our
agriculture and our manufactures. Let this market suddenly
close, and manufactures will stop, commerce will go into
bankruptcy, and agriculture will be smothered beneath its
products.
But how is it conceivable that a nation should find its market
clogged because of having got rid of its useless mouths? Ask
rather why an engine, whose consumption has been figured at six
hundred pounds of coal an hour, loses its power if it is given
only three hundred. But again, might not these non-producers be
made producers, since we cannot get rid of them? Eh! child: tell
me, then, how you will do without police, and monopoly, and
competition, and all the contradictions, in short, of which your
order of things is made up.
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