The
fashion and style of our malice change with time: the barons of
the middle ages plundered the traveller on the highway, and then
offered him hospitality in their castles; mercantile feudality,
less brutal, exploits the proletaire and builds hospitals for
him: who would dare to say which of the two has deserved the palm
of virtue?
Of all the economic contradictions value is that which,
dominating the others and summing them up, holds in a sense the
sceptre of society, I had almost said of the moral world. Until
value, oscillating between its two poles,--useful value and value
in exchange,--arrives at its constitution, thine and mine remain
fixed arbitrarily; the conditions of fortune are the effect of
chance; property rests on a precarious title; everything in
social economy is provisional. What should social, intelligent,
and free beings have learned from this uncertainty of value? To
make amicable regulations that should protect labor and guarantee
exchange and cheapness. What a happy opportunity for all to make
up, by honesty, disinterestedness, and tenderness of heart, for
the ignorance of the objective laws of the just and the unjust!
Instead of that, commerce has everywhere become, by spontaneous
effort and unanimous consent, an uncertain operation, a
venturesome enterprise, a lottery, and often a deceitful and
fraudulent speculation.
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