, and
emperors have always employed the ruse of throwing a scrap of food to
the people to gain time to snatch up the whip--it is natural that
"practical" men should extol this method of perpetuating the wage
system. What need to rack our brains when we have the time-honoured
method of the Pharaohs at our disposal?

Yet should the Revolution be so misguided as to start on this path, it
would be lost.

In 1848, when the national workshops were opened on February 27, the
unemployed of Paris numbered only 8,000; a fortnight later they had
already increased to 49,000. They would soon have been 100,000, without
counting those who crowded in from the provinces.

Yet at that time trade and manufacturers in France employed half as many
hands as to-day. And we know that in time of Revolution exchange and
industry suffer most from the general upheaval. We have only to think,
indeed, of the number of workmen whose labour depends directly or
indirectly upon export trade, or of the number of hands employed in
producing luxuries, whose consumers are the middle-class minority.

A revolution in Europe means, then, the unavoidable stoppage of at least
half the factories and workshops. It means millions of workers and their
families thrown on the streets. And our "practical men" would seek to
avert this truly terrible situation by means of national relief works;
that is to say, by means of new industries created on the spot to give
work to the unemployed!

It is evident, as Proudhon had already pointed out more than fifty years
ago, that the smallest attack upon property will bring in its train the
complete disorganization of the system based upon private enterprise and
wage labour. Society itself will be forced to take production in hand,
in its entirety, and to reorganize it to meet the needs of the whole
people. But this cannot be accomplished in a day, or even in a month; it
must take a certain time to reorganize the system of production, and
during this time millions of men will be deprived of the means of
subsistence. What then is to be done?

There is only one really _practical_ solution of the problem--boldly to
face the great task which awaits us, and instead of trying to patch up a
situation which we ourselves have made untenable, to proceed to
reorganize production on a new basis.

Thus the really practical course of action, in our view, would be that
the people should take immediate possession of all the food of the
i