nd in all human probability will not end for a long
time. Proudhon wished to unite both, one with another,--to unite water
with fire. Like all Utopians, he desired--he who all his life, in his
numerous writings, so frequently confuted and sneered at them--that
the human race might be metamorphosed in order to accept unanimously
his ideas about society. For that the men of his day were not fit for
a true democracy--that is, for anarchy--he was honest enough to admit.

"Nothing is in reality less democratic than the people," said he,
occasionally, and he did not allow himself the least delusion as
regards their slavish love for authority. For that very reason, he
thought democracy must be changed into "demopaedy," and a complete
revolution of a popular spirit must be caused by education. But to
prove that, even with the help of democracy, people would not be ripe
for pure democracy, or, rightly speaking, for anarchy, we can quote an
authority which he never doubted, namely, himself. In an access of
pessimism, he said once, "I have thought I have noticed (may
philosophy pardon me for it!) that the more reason develops in us the
more brutal becomes passion when once it is let loose. It appears then
that the angel and the biped brute which together compose our human
nature in their intimate union, instead of mingling their attributes,
only live side by side with one another. If progress leads us to that,
of what use is it?" This is a bad look-out for the great moral
revolution upon which Proudhon more and more based all his hopes.

Proudhon has had the most varied judgment passed upon him. Some have
treated him as an obscure pamphlet writer. Louis Blanc calls him a
prizefighter; Laveleye, in a history of Socialism, only considers him
worth mentioning in order to call his ideas "the dreams of a raving
idiot"; Karl Marx denies him either talent or knowledge; many have
considered him as a Jesuitical hypocrite; others, again, his
followers and representatives, have called him the greatest man of the
century. Ludwig Pfau called him the clearest thinker that France had
produced since Descartes. But the spectacle is by no means new. In
reality, but little courage and wit are to-day needed to acquire the
applause of an ignorant multitude which has no idea of Proudhon's
train of thought by the condemnation of the father of Anarchism.
"Justice must be done to all, even to Louis Napoleon," exclaimed
Proudhon, to the great astonishment