the labor among the whole number of laborers. The capacity,
given to all, of accomplishing a social task,--that is, an equal
task,--and the impossibility of paying one laborer save in the products
of another, justify the equality of wages."

% 7.--That Inequality of Powers is the Necessary Condition of Equality
of Fortunes.

It is objected,--and this objection constitutes the second part of the
St. Simonian, and the third part of the Fourierstic, maxims,--

"That all kinds of labor cannot be executed with equal ease. Some
require great superiority of skill and intelligence; and on this
superiority is based the price. The artist, the savant, the poet, the
statesman, are esteemed only because of their excellence; and this
excellence destroys all similitude between them and other men: in the
presence of these heights of science and genius the law of equality
disappears. Now, if equality is not absolute, there is no equality.
From the poet we descend to the novelist; from the sculptor to the
stonecutter; from the architect to the mason; from the chemist to the
cook, &c. Capacities are classified and subdivided into orders, genera,
and species. The extremes of talent are connected by intermediate
talents. Humanity is a vast hierarchy, in which the individual estimates
himself by comparison, and fixes his price by the value placed upon his
product by the public."

This objection always has seemed a formidable one. It is the
stumbling-block of the economists, as well as of the defenders of
equality. It has led the former into egregious blunders, and has caused
the latter to utter incredible platitudes. Gracchus Babeuf wished all
superiority to be STRINGENTLY REPRESSED, and even PERSECUTED AS A SOCIAL
CALAMITY. To establish his communistic edifice, he lowered all citizens
to the stature of the smallest. Ignorant eclectics have been known to
object to the inequality of knowledge, and I should not be surprised if
some one should yet rebel against the inequality of virtue. Aristotle
was banished, Socrates drank the hemlock, Epaminondas was called to
account, for having proved superior in intelligence and virtue to some
dissolute and foolish demagogues. Such follies will be re-enacted, so
long as the inequality of fortunes justifies a populace, blinded and
oppressed by the wealthy, in fearing the elevation of new tyrants to
power.

Nothing seems more unnatural than that which we examine too closely, and
often nothing see