f consideration,
baseness, or infamy. It is a deplorable, sad spectacle, just like
contemplating a flourishing field of wheat destroyed by a herd of wild
beasts. No doubt that inheritance, property, are, and ought to be,
inviolable, sacred. Wealth acquired or transmitted ought to be able to
shine with impunity and magnificently in the eyes of the poor and
suffering masses. We must, too, see those frightful disproportions which
exist between the millionaire Saint-Remy, and the artisan Morel. But,
inasmuch as these inevitable disproportions are consecrated, protected
by the law, so those who possess such wealth ought morally to be
accountable to those who have only probity, resignation, courage, and
desire to labour.

In the eyes of reason, human right, and even of a well-understood social
interest, a great fortune should be a hereditary deposit, confided to
prudent, firm, skilful, generous hands, which, entrusted at the same
time to fructify and expend this fortune, know how to fertilise, vivify,
and ameliorate all that should have the felicity to find themselves
within the scope of its splendid and salutary rays.

And sometimes it is so, but the instances are very rare. How many young
men, like Saint-Remy, masters at twenty of a large patrimony, spend it
foolishly in idleness, in waste, in vice, for want of knowing how to
employ their wealth more advantageously either for themselves or for the
public. Others, alarmed at the instability of human affairs, save in the
meanest manner. Thus there are those who, knowing that a fixed fortune
always diminishes, give themselves up, fools or rogues, to that
hazardous, immoral gaming, which the powers that be encourage and
patronise.

How can it be otherwise? Who imparts to inexperienced youth that
knowledge, that instruction, those rudiments of individual and social
economy? No one.

The rich man is thrown into the heart of society with his riches, as the
poor man with his poverty. No one takes any more care of the
superfluities of the one than of the wants of the other. No one thinks
any more of making the one moralise than the other. Ought not power to
fulfil this great and noble task?

If, taking to its pity the miseries, the continually increasing
troubles, of the still resigned workmen, repressing a rivalry injurious
to all, and, addressing itself finally to the imminent question of the
organisation of labour, it gave itself the salutary lesson of the
association of c