seasons. The devouring action of property bears, then, principally upon business. We commonly say commercial crises, not agricultural crises; because, while the farmer is eaten up slowly by the right of increase, the manufacturer is swallowed at a single mouthful. This leads to the cessation of business, the destruction of fortunes, and the inactivity of the working people; who die one after another on the highways, and in the hospitals, prisons, and galleys.
To sum up this proposition:—
Property sells products to the laborer for more than it pays him for them; therefore it is impossible.
appendix to the fifth proposition.
I. Certain reformers, and even the most of the publicists—who, though belonging to no particular school, busy themselves in devising means for the amelioration of the lot of the poorer and more numerous class—lay much stress now-a-days on a better organization of labor. The disciples of Fourier, especially, never stop shouting, “On to the phalanx!” declaiming in the same breath against the foolishness and absurdity of other sects. They consist of half-a-dozen incomparable geniuses who have discovered that five and four make nine; take two away, and nine remain,—and who weep over the blindness of France, who refuses to believe in this astonishing arithmetic.[1]
- ↑ Fourier, having to multiply a whole number by a fraction, never failed, they say, to obtain a product much greater than the multiplicand. He affirmed that under his system of harmony the mercury would solidify when the temperature was above zero. He might as well have said that the Harmonians would make burning ice. I once asked an intelligent phalansterian what he thought of such physics. “I do not know,” he answered; “but I believe.” And yet the same man disbelieved in the doctrine of the Real Presence.
