aised by this objection is merely to know, on the one hand,
whether you effectively obtain by wage-work, the results that are said
to be obtained, and, on the other hand, whether voluntary work is not
already now more productive than work stimulated by wages. A question
which, to be dealt with properly, would require a serious study. But
whereas in exact sciences men give their opinion on subjects infinitely
less important and less complicated after serious research, after
carefully collecting and analyzing facts--on this question they will
pronounce judgment without appeal, resting satisfied with any one
particular event, such as, for example, the want of success of some
communist association in America. They act like the barrister who does
not see in the counsel for the opposite side a representative of a
cause, or an opinion contrary to his own, but a simple nuisance,--an
adversary in an oratorical debate; and if he be lucky enough to find a
repartee, does not otherwise care to justify his cause. Therefore the
study of this essential basis of all Political Economy, _the study of
the most favourable conditions for giving society the greatest amount of
useful products with the least waste of human energy_, does not advance.
People either limit themselves to repeating commonplace assertions, or
else they pretend ignorance of our assertions.

What is most striking in this levity is that even in capitalist
Political Economy you already find a few writers compelled by facts to
doubt the axiom put forth by the founders of their science, that the
threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work. They begin
to perceive that in production a certain _collective element_ is
introduced, which has been too much neglected up till now, and which
might be more important than personal gain. The inferior quality of
wage-work, the terrible waste of human energy in modern agricultural and
industrial labour, the ever-growing quantity of pleasure-seekers, who
shift their burden on to others' shoulders, the absence of a certain
animation in production that is becoming more and more apparent; all
this is beginning to preoccupy the economists of the "classical" school.
Some of them ask themselves if they have not got on the wrong track: if
the imaginary evil being, that was supposed to be tempted exclusively by
a bait of lucre or wages, really exists. This heresy penetrates even
into universities; it is found in books of orthodox e