payment arrested
credit, and prevented the employment of capital in agricultural
enterprises. This cause of distrust no longer existing, capitalists will
find new markets, agriculture will rapidly develop, and farmers will
be the first to enjoy the benefit of the new law. 3. Finally, it was
iniquitous and absurd, that, on account of a protested note, a poor
manufacturer should see in twenty-four hours his business arrested, his
labor suspended, his merchandise seized, his machinery sold at auction,
and finally himself led off to prison, while two years were sometimes
necessary to expropriate the most miserable piece of real estate.

These arguments, and others besides, you clearly stated, sir, in your
first lectures of this academic year.

But, when stating these excellent arguments, did you ask yourself, sir,
whither would tend such a transformation of our system of mortgages?...
To monetize, if I may say so, landed property; to accumulate it within
portfolios; to separate the laborer from the soil, man from Nature; to
make him a wanderer over the face of the earth; to eradicate from
his heart every trace of family feeling, national pride, and love of
country; to isolate him more and more; to render him indifferent to
all around him; to concentrate his love upon one object,--money; and,
finally, by the dishonest practices of usury, to monopolize the land
to the profit of a financial aristocracy,--a worthy auxiliary of that
industrial feudality whose pernicious influence we begin to feel so
bitterly. Thus, little by little, the subordination of the laborer to
the idler, the restoration of abolished castes, and the distinction
between patrician and plebeian, would be effected; thus, thanks to the
new privileges granted to the property of the capitalists, that of the
small and intermediate proprietors would gradually disappear, and with
it the whole class of free and honest laborers. This certainly is not
my plan for the abolition of property. Far from mobilizing the soil, I
would, if possible, immobilize even the functions of pure intelligence,
so that society might be the fulfilment of the intentions of Nature,
who gave us our first possession, the land. For, if the instrument
or capital of production is the mark of the laborer, it is also his
pedestal, his support, his country, and, as the Psalmist says, THE PLACE
OF HIS ACTIVITY AND HIS REST. [38]

Let us examine more closely still the inevitable and approaching r