Masterships,
corporations, and rights of primogeniture were conceived under
the influence of this idea; many communists even are not hostile
to this form of association; is it surprising that the ideal is
so tenacious among those who, conquered but not converted, still
appear as its representatives? What, then, prevented charity,
union, sacrifice from maintaining themselves in the hierarchy,
when the hierarchy might have been only a condition of labor? To
this end it would have sufficed if men having machines, valiant
knights fighting with equal weapons, had not made a mystery of
their secrets or withheld them from others; if barons had set to
work, not to monopolize their products, but to cheapen them; and
if vassals, assured that war would result only in increasing
their wealth, had always shown themselves enterprising,
industrious, and faithful. The chief of the workshop would then
have been simply a captain putting his men through manoeuvres in
their interest as well as in his own, and maintaining them, not
with his perquisites, but with their own services.
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