第140章

they will be frank with you; all will tell you that the commission business is extortion.Complaints are made of the frauds and adulterations which disgrace manufactures: commerce -- I refer especially to the commission business -- is only a gigantic and permanent conspiracy of monopolists, by turns competing or joined in pools; it is not a function performed with a view to a legitimate profit, but a vast organization of speculation in all articles of consumption, as well as on the circulation of persons and products.Already swindling is tolerated in this profession: how many way-bills overcharged, erased, altered! how many stamps counterfeited! how much damage concealed or fraudulently compounded! how many lies as to quality! how many promises given and retracted! how many documents suppressed! what intrigues and combinations! and then what treasons!

The commission-merchant -- that is, the merchant -- that is, the man -is a gambler, a slanderer, a charlatan, a mercenary, a thief, a forger....

This is the effect of our antagonistic society, observe the neo-mystics.

So say the commercial people, the first under all circumstances to accuse the corruption of the century.They act as they do, if we may believe them, simply to indemnify themselves and wholly against their inclination: they follow necessity; theirs is a case of legitimate defence.

Does it require an effort of genius to see that these mutual recriminations strike at the very nature of man, that the pretended perversion of society is nothing but the perversion of man, and that the opposition of principles and interests is only an external accident, so to speak, which brings into relief, but without exerting a necessitating influence, both the blackness of our egoism and the rare virtues with which our race is honored?

I understand inharmonious competition and its irresistible eliminating effects: this is inevitable.Competition, in its higher expression, is the gearing by means of which laborers reciprocally stimulate and sustain each other.But, pending the realization of that organization which must elevate competition to its veritable nature, it remains a civil war in which producers, instead of aiding each other in labor, grind and crush each other by labor.The danger here was imminent; man, to avert it, had this supreme law of love; and nothing was easier, while pushing competition to its extreme limits in the interest of production, than to then repair its murderous effects by an equitable distribution.Far from that, this anarchical competition has become, as it were, the soul and spirit of the laborer.Political economy placed in the hands of man this weapon of death, and he has struck; he has used competition, as the lion uses his paws and jaws, to kill and devour.How is it, then, I repeat, that a wholly external accident has changed the nature of man, which is supposed to be good and gentle and social?

The wine merchant calls to his aid jelly, magnin, insects, water, and poisons; by combinations of his own he adds to the destructive effects of competition.Whence comes this mania? From the fact, you say, that his competitor sets him the example! And this competitor, who incites him?

Some other competitor.So that, if we make the tour of society, we shall find that it is the mass, and in the mass each particular individual, who, by a tacit agreement of their passions, -- pride, indolence, greed, distrust, jealousy, -- have organized this detestable war.

After having gathered about him tools, material, and workmen, the contractor must recover in the product, besides the amount of his outlay, first the interest of his capital, and then a profit.It is in consequence of this principle that lending at interest has finally become established, and that gain, considered in itself, has always passed for legitimate.Under this system, the police of nations not having seen at first the essential contradiction of loans at interest, the wage-worker, instead of depending directly upon himself, had to depend upon an employer, as the soldier belonged to the count, or the tribe to the patriarch.This order of things was necessary, and, pending the establishment of complete equality, it was not impossible that the welfare of all should be secured by it.But when the master, in his disorderly egoism, has said to the servant: "You shall not share with me," and robbed him at one stroke of labor and wages, where is the necessity, where the excuse? Will it be necessary further, in order to justify the concupiscible appetite, to fall back on the irascible appetite? Take care:

in drawing back in order to justify the human being in the series of his lusts, instead of saving his morality, you abandon it.For my part, I prefer the guilty man to the wild-beast man.