, while I, in accordance
with all precedent, call it a destruction of property. In fact, without
the appropriation of instruments, property is nothing.

"Hitherto, we have confined ourselves to pointing out and combating the
despotic features of property, by considering property alone. We have
failed to see that the despotism of property is a correlative of the
division of the human race;... that property, instead of being organized
in such a way as to facilitate the unlimited communion of man with his
fellows and with the universe, has been, on the contrary, turned against
this communion."

Let us translate this into commercial phraseology. In order to destroy
despotism and the inequality of conditions, men must cease from
competition and must associate their interests. Let employer and
employed (now enemies and rivals) become associates.

Now, ask any manufacturer, merchant, or capitalist, whether he would
consider himself a proprietor if he were to share his revenue and
profits with this mass of wage-laborers whom it is proposed to make his
associates.

"Family, property, and country are finite things, which ought to be
organized with a view to the infinite. For man is a finite being,
who aspires to the infinite. To him, absolute finiteness is evil. The
infinite is his aim, the indefinite his right."

Few of my readers would understand these hierophantic words, were I to
leave them unexplained. M. Leroux means, by this magnificent formula,
that humanity is a single immense society, which, in its collective
unity, represents the infinite; that every nation, every tribe, every
commune, and every citizen are, in different degrees, fragments or
finite members of the infinite society, the evil in which results
solely from individualism and privilege,--in other words, from the
subordination of the infinite to the finite; finally, that, to attain
humanity's end and aim, each part has a right to an indefinitely
progressive development.

"All the evils which afflict the human race arise from caste. The family
is a blessing; the family caste (the nobility) is an evil. Country is
a blessing; the country caste (supreme, domineering, conquering) is an
evil; property (individual possession) is a blessing; the property
caste (the domain of property of Pothier, Toullier, Troplong, &c.) is an
evil."

Thus, according to M. Leroux, there is property and property,--the one
good, the other bad. Now, as it is proper to