nd
the course of events reveals it to us. Society advances from equation to
equation. To the eyes of the economist, the revolutions of empires
seem now like the reduction of algebraical quantities, which are
inter-deducible; now like the discovery of unknown quantities, induced
by the inevitable influence of time. Figures are the providence of
history. Undoubtedly there are other elements in human progress; but in
the multitude of hidden causes which agitate nations, there is none more
powerful or constant, none less obscure, than the periodical explosions
of the proletariat against property. Property, acting by exclusion
and encroachment, while population was increasing, has been the
life-principle and definitive cause of all revolutions. Religious wars,
and wars of conquest, when they have stopped short of the extermination
of races, have been only accidental disturbances, soon repaired by the
mathematical progression of the life of nations. The downfall and death
of societies are due to the power of accumulation possessed by property.

In the middle ages, take Florence,--a republic of merchants and brokers,
always rent by its well-known factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, who
were, after all, only the people and the proprietors fighting against
each other,--Florence, ruled by bankers, and borne down at last by the
weight of her debts; [26] in ancient times, take Rome, preyed upon from
its birth by usury, flourishing, nevertheless, as long as the known
world furnished its terrible proletaires with LABOR stained with blood
by civil war at every interval of rest, and dying of exhaustion when
the people lost, together with their former energy, their last spark
of moral sense; Carthage, a commercial and financial city, continually
divided by internal competition; Tyre, Sidon, Jerusalem, Nineveh,
Babylon, ruined, in turn, by commercial rivalry and, as we now express
it, by panics in the market,--do not these famous examples show clearly
enough the fate which awaits modern nations, unless the people,
unless France, with a sudden burst of her powerful voice, proclaims in
thunder-tones the abolition of the regime of property?

Here my task should end. I have proved the right of the poor; I have
shown the usurpation of the rich. I demand justice; it is not my
business to execute the sentence. If it should be argued--in order to
prolong for a few years an illegitimate privilege--that it is not enough
to demonstrate equali