s. 3d., this decision was
hailed as an act of superior democratic equality. In reality, the
Commune only ratified the former inequality between functionary and
soldier, Government and governed. Coming from an Opportunist Chamber of
Deputies, such a decision would have appeared admirable, but the Commune
doomed her own revolutionary principles when she failed to put them into
practice.

Under our existing social system, when a minister gets paid L4,000 a
year, while a workman must content himself with L40 or less; when a
foreman is paid two or three times more than a workman, and among
workmen there is every gradation, from 8s. a day down to the peasant
girl's 3d., we disapprove of the high salary of the minister as well as
of the difference between the 8s. of the workman and the 3d. of the poor
woman. And we say, '"Down with the privileges of education, as well as
with those of birth!" We are anarchists precisely because these
privileges revolt us.

They revolt us already in this authoritarian society. Could we endure
them in a society that began by proclaiming equality?

This is why some collectivists, understanding the impossibility of
maintaining a scale of wages in a society inspired by the breath of the
Revolution, hasten to proclaim equality of wage. But they meet with new
difficulties, and their equality of wages becomes the same unrealizable
Utopia as the scale of wages of other collectivists.

A society having taken possession of all social wealth, having boldly
proclaimed the right of all to this wealth--whatever share they may have
taken in producing it--will be compelled to abandon any system of wages,
whether in currency or labour-notes.

IV

The collectivists say, "To each according to his deeds"; or, in other
terms, according to his share of services rendered to society. They
think it expedient to put this principle into practice, as soon as the
Social Revolution will have made all instruments of production common
property. But we think that if the Social Revolution had the misfortune
of proclaiming such a principle, it would mean its necessary failure; it
would mean leaving the social problem, which past centuries have
burdened us with, unsolved.

Of course, in a society like ours, in which the more a man works the
less he is remunerated, this principle, at first sight, may appear to be
a yearning for justice. But in reality it is only the perpetuation of
injustice. It was by proclaiming this