hy not suppress individual proprietorship altogether? Our
extreme logicians, with Babaeuf at the head of them, go as far as that,
and Saint-Just seems to be of that opinion.[2184] We are not concerned
with the enacting of an Agrarian; the nation may reserve the soil to
itself and divide among individuals, not the soil, but its lease. The
outcome of this principle affords us a glimpse of an order of things in
which the State, sole proprietor of real-estate, sole capitalist, sole
manufacturer, sole trader, having all Frenchmen in its pay and service,
would assign to each one his task according to his aptitude, and
distribute to each one his rations according to his wants.[2185]--These
various uncompleted plans still float in a hazy distance but their
common purpose is clearly distinguishable.

"All which tends to center human passions on the vile, individual ego
must be repudiated or repressed;"[2186]

We should annihilate special interests, deprive the individual of
the motives and means for self-isolation, suppress preoccupations and
ambitions by which Man makes himself a focal point at the expense of the
real center, in short, to detach him from himself in order to attach him
wholly to the State.

This is why, disregarding the narrow egoism through which the individual
prefers himself to the community, we strive towards the enlarged egoism
by which the individual prefers the community to the group of which he
forms a part. Under no pretext must he separate himself from the whole,
at no price, must he be allowed to form for himself a small homeland
within the large one, for, by the affection he entertains for the small
one, he frustrates the objects of the large one. Nothing is worse than
political, civil, religious and domestic federalism; we combat it under
all its forms.[2187] In this particular, the Constituent Assembly has
paved the way for us, since it has broken up all the principal historic
or material groups by which men have separated themselves from the
masses and formed a band apart, provinces, clergy, nobles, parliaments,
religious orders and trades-unions. We complete its work, we destroy
churches, we suppress literary or scientific associations, educational
or benevolent societies, even down to financial companies.[2188] We
prohibit any departmental or commercial "local spirit:" we find

"odious and opposed to all principles, that, amongst municipalities,
some should be rich and others poor, that one s