hinery, in the digging of new mines. You
will carefully weigh what part of the new produce belongs to you. You
will count your minutes of work, and you will take care that a minute of
your neighbours should not buy more than yours.

"And as an hour measures nothing, as in some factories a worker can see
to six power-looms at a time, while in another he only tends two, you
will weigh the muscular force, the brain energy, and the nervous energy
you have expended. You will accurately calculate the years of
apprenticeship in order to appraise the amount each will contribute to
future production. And this--after having declared that you do not take
into account his share in _past_ production."

Well, for us it is evident that a society cannot be based on two
absolutely opposed principles, two principles that contradict one
another continually. And a nation or a commune which would have such an
organization would be compelled to revert to private property in the
instruments of production, or to transform itself into a communist
society.

III

We have said that certain collectivist writers desire that a distinction
should be made between _qualified_ or professional work and _simple_
work. They pretend that an hour's work of an engineer, an architect, or
a doctor, must be considered as two or three hours' work of a
blacksmith, a mason, or a hospital nurse. And the same distinction must
be made between all sorts of trades necessitating apprenticeship, and
the simple toil of day labourers.

Well, to establish this distinction would be to maintain all the
inequalities of present society. It would mean fixing a dividing line,
from the beginning, between the workers and those who pretend to govern
them. It would mean dividing society into two very distinct classes--the
aristocracy of knowledge placed above the horny-handed lower orders--the
one doomed to serve the other; the one working with its hands to feed
and clothe those who, profiting by their leisure, study how to govern
their fosterers.

It would mean reviving one of the distinct peculiarities of present
society and giving it the sanction of the Social Revolution. It would
mean setting up as a principle an abuse already condemned in our ancient
crumbling society.

We know the answer we shall get. They will speak of "Scientific
Socialism"; they will quote bourgeois economists, and Marx too, to prove
that a scale of wages has its _raison d'etre_, as "the labour forc