their learning, have failed to perceive a fact so simple and so evident.
If they have perceived it, why have they neglected to condemn it?

HISTORICAL COMMENT.--Much interest is felt at present in a financial
operation which is expected to result in a reduction of the budget.
It is proposed to change the present rate of increase, five per cent.
Laying aside the politico-legal question to deal only with the financial
question,--is it not true that, when five per cent. is changed to four
per cent., it will then be necessary, for the same reasons, to change
four to three; then three to two, then two to one, and finally to sweep
away increase altogether? But that would be the advent of equality of
conditions and the abolition of property. Now it seems to me, that an
intelligent nation should voluntarily meet an inevitable revolution
half way, instead of suffering itself to be dragged after the car of
inflexible necessity.

EIGHTH PROPOSITION.

Property is impossible, because its power of Accumulation is infinite,
and is exercised only over finite quantities.

If men, living in equality, should grant to one of their number the
exclusive right of property; and this sole proprietor should lend one
hundred francs to the human race at compound interest, payable to his
descendants twenty-four generations hence,--at the end of six hundred
years this sum of one hundred francs, at five per cent., would amount to
107,854,010,777,600 francs; two thousand six hundred and ninety-six
and one-third times the capital of France (supposing her capital to be
40,000,000,000), or more than twenty times the value of the terrestrial
globe!

Suppose that a man, in the reign of St. Louis, had borrowed one hundred
francs, and had refused,--he and his heirs after him,--to return it.
Even though it were known that the said heirs were not the rightful
possessors, and that prescription had been interrupted always at the
right moment,--nevertheless, by our laws, the last heir would be obliged
to return the one hundred francs with interest, and interest on the
interest; which in all would amount, as we have seen, to nearly one
hundred and eight thousand billions.

Every day, fortunes are growing in our midst much more rapidly than
this. The preceding example supposed the interest equal to one-twentieth
of the capital,--it often equals one-tenth, one-fifth, one-half of the
capital; and sometimes the capital itself.

The Fourierists--irrecon