profit
which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the
fact that his house is built in a town--that is, in an agglomeration of
thousands of other houses, possessing paved streets, bridges, quays, and
fine public buildings, well lighted, and affording to its inhabitants a
thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town in
regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of
industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or
thirty generations has made habitable, healthy, and beautiful.

A house in certain parts of Paris is valued at many thousands of pounds
sterling, not because thousands of pounds' worth of labour have been
expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because
for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and
letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day--a centre of
industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a
past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are
household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is
the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations
of the whole French nation.

Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the
meanest building in such a city, without committing a flagrant
injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest
portion of the common heritage?

On that point, as we have said, the workers begin to be agreed. The idea
of free dwellings showed its existence very plainly during the siege of
Paris, when the cry was for an abatement pure and simple of the terms
demanded by the landlords. It appeared again during the Commune of 1871,
when the Paris workmen expected the Council of the Commune to decide
boldly on the abolition of rent. And when the New Revolution comes, it
will be the first question with which the poor will concern themselves.

Whether in time of revolution or in time of peace, the worker must be
housed somehow or other; he must have some sort of roof over his head.
But, however tumble-down and squalid his dwelling may be, there is
always a landlord who can evict him. True, during the Revolution the
landlord cannot find bailiffs and police-sergeants to throw the
workman's rags and chattels into the street, but who knows what the new
Government will do to-morrow? Who can say that it will not call coercion
to its aid again, a