in which
all of them take an interest.

It is true that a learned society, like the individual author, goes to a
printing office where workmen are engaged to do the printing. Nowadays,
those who belong to the learned societies despise manual labour which
indeed is carried on under very bad conditions; but a community which
would give a generous philosophic and _scientific_ education to all its
members, would know how to organize manual labour in such a way that it
would be the pride of humanity. Its learned societies would become
associations of explorers, lovers of science, and workers--all knowing a
manual trade and all interested in science.

If, for example, the Society is studying geology, all will contribute to
the exploration of the earth's strata; each member will take his share
in research, and ten thousand observers, where we have now only a
hundred, will do more in a year than we can do in twenty years. And when
their works are to be published, ten thousand men and women, skilled in
different trades, will be ready to draw maps, engrave designs, compose,
and print the books. With gladness will they give their leisure--in
summer to exploration, in winter to indoor work. And when their works
appear, they will find not only a hundred, but ten thousand readers
interested in their common work.

This is the direction in which progress is already moving. Even to-day,
when England felt the need of a complete dictionary of the English
language, the birth of a Littre, who would devote his life to this work,
was not waited for. Volunteers were appealed to, and a thousand men
offered their services, spontaneously and gratuitously, to ransack the
libraries, to take notes, and to accomplish in a few years a work which
one man could not complete in his lifetime. In all branches of human
intelligence the same spirit is breaking forth, and we should have a
very limited knowledge of humanity could we not guess that the future is
announcing itself in such tentative co-operation, which is gradually
taking the place of individual work.

For this dictionary to be a really collective work, it would have been
necessary that many volunteer authors, printers, and printers' readers
should have worked in common; but something in this direction is done
already in the Socialist Press, which offers us examples of manual and
intellectual work combined. It happens in our newspapers that a
Socialist author composes in lead his own article