nce,
monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the
rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly,
feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which
sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State
in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in
which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral
element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition
abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made
by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore
impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is
not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The
two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice, you will
be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial power, or, like
England, a material power; you will be the wicked rich man. You will die
by an act of violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England
will fall. And the world will allow to die and fall all that is merely
selfishness, all that does not represent for the human race either a
virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England, we
designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations
always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people, will live
again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is
immortal. That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by
the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who
is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust,
mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and
compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science
the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one
and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render
property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal,
so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor