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Bache and Morin nodded without replying. They both professed horror of Anarchism; while Morin, forgetting that the word if not the thing dated from his first master Proudhon, clung to his Comtist doctrines, in the conviction that science alone would ensure the happiness and pacification of the nations.
Proudhon dedicated it, in a letter which served as the preface, to the Academy of Besancon. The latter, finding itself brought to trial by its pensioner, took the affair to heart, and evoked it, says Sainte Beuve, with all possible haste. The pension narrowly escaped being immediately withdrawn from the bold defender of the principle of equality of conditions.
But since property, if recognized at all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he must go farther still, and agitate for the total abolition of property, as an injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with M. Proudhon, or the Englishman Godwin. It is unjust that one should have what another wants, or even more than another.
The vast extent of small industry, with the apprentice, journeyman, and master-workman, has wielded an influence over the mentality of the French workers. Berth, for instance, follows Proudhon in conceiving of the future commonwealth as a federation of innumerable little workshops.
After having published in "Le Representant du Peuple," the statutes of the Bank of Exchange, a bank which was to make no profits, since it was to have no stockholders, and which, consequently, was to discount commercial paper with out interest, charging only a commission sufficient to defray its running expenses, Proudhon endeavored, in a number of articles, to explain its mechanism and necessity.
Hegel's great idea, which Proudhon appropriated, and which he demonstrates with wonderful ability in the "System of Economical Contradictions," is as follows: Antinomy, that is, the existence of two laws or tendencies which are opposed to each other, is possible, not only with two different things, but with one and the same thing.
One feels the need of relaxation after it in something easy, natural, and gay. The language of Rousseau demands an amount of labor which makes one long for recreation and relief. But how many writers and how many books descend from our Rousseau! On my way I noticed the points of departure of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Proudhon.
He had become acquainted with Morin since his return from Rome, and had helped him to introduce a translation of an excellent scientific manual, prepared according to the official programmes, into the Italian schools.* A Franc-Comtois by birth, a compatriot of Proudhon, with whose poor family he had been intimate at Besancon, Morin, himself the son of a journeyman clockmaker, had grown up with Proudhonian ideas, full of affection for the poor and an instinctive hatred of property and wealth.
"It has often been observed," he says, "that the anarchists are by origin artisan, peasant, or aristocrat. Rousseau represents, obviously, the anarchism of the artisan. His republic is a little republic of free and independent craftsmen.... Proudhon is a peasant in his heart ... and, if we finally take Tolstoi, we find here an anarchism of worldly or aristocratic origin.
"Products," he says, "are only exchanged for products; but since every bargain presupposes the equality of products, profit is impossible and not right." By this proposition the question of pauperism and everything evil is to be solved, and, in fact, Proudhon even made some attempts to realise the theory contained therein.
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