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Citizens, I declare to you, that your progress is madness, that your humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your republic is a monster, that your young and virgin France comes from the brothel, and I maintain it against all, whoever you may be, whether journalists, economists, legists, or even were you better judges of liberty, of equality, and fraternity than the knife of the guillotine!
The political economists can assign as reasons some peculiar conditions prevailing in each of these periods, but the wisest have never gone deep enough to discover the general cause; this constant centralizing draft of usury. In these periods of commercial disaster there is no destruction of property. There is only a general shake up and redistribution.
Our economists treat every increase of productiveness as an unalloyed good. It is good, provided that men are not kept idle by it. Evidently there is no national gain from sixty men doing the work of a hundred, if thereby forty men are tossed into unwilling idleness, and must live on charity, some of the forty losing all habits of industry, and perhaps becoming criminal. This is a national loss.
But I must close this chapter with an exposition of one of those startling truths which never have been dreamed of by legists or economists. That, from the Stand-point of Justice, Labor destroys Property. This proposition is the logical result of the two preceding sections, which we have just summed up.
At one moment the Government was disposed to yield to the current, but it was restrained by an influential group of conservative Political Economists, who appealed to patriotic sentiment, and by the Moscow manufacturers, who declared that Free Trade would ruin the country. After a little hesitation it proceeded to raise, instead of lowering, the protectionist tariff.
The attempts to do so in Belgium and England are well known. Some advanced political economists who have studied the subject, declare that a five-hour day would suffice.
While a war on so large a scale was being waged there was but little time to spare for the work of the legislator, though it is not foreign to our subject to relate that in 1855 the last of those taxes which the political economists denounced as taxes on knowledge, the tax on newspapers, was abolished. Originally it had been fourpence; in 1836 Mr.
One has only to glance at the North American budget and compare it with what our thirty-eight duodecimo fatherland has to pay in order to be administered and over-disciplined. The blustering outbreaks of this conceited demagogy are answered not by the communists, but by such middle-class economists as Ricardo, Senior, etc., in a few words. The economic existence of the State is the taxes.
I suppose that it is inevitable that many readers will have concluded that the preceding chapters must be taken to mean that the distribution of wealth is not susceptible of any appreciable change. I would remind those readers of an important distinction upon which impatient people have sometimes based a complaint against economists.
The United States is not doing as much as it ought in the working of these fibres, and the money which is paid for the purchase of foreign linens and fabrics made of other materials than cotton and wool might, some economists think, be employed at home in making them.
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