I SHALL merely allude to a subject here which should be treated in full, namely, The Right of Man to Labor; in other words, the right to regular, congenial, and remunerative employment. I shall take good care not to renew the old political controversy upon the rights of man. After the revolutions to which this controversy has given rise, will it be believed that we are running the risk of new political convulsions for having overlooked the first and most important of these rights, namely, the Right to Labor?—a Right of which our politicians have never made the least mention, according to their uniform habit of omitting the most important questions in every branch of science.

  Among the influence tending to restrict this right, I shall cite the formation of privileged corporations which, conducting a given branch of Industry, monopolize it, and arbitrarily close the doors of labor against whomever they please.

  These corporations will become dangerous and lead to new outbreaks and convulsions, only by being extended to the whole commercial and industrial system. This event is not far distant, and it will be brought about all the more easily from the fact that it is not apprehended. The greatest evils have often sprung from imperceptible germs, as, for instance, Jacobinism. And if Civilization has engendered this and so many similar calamities, may it not engender others which we do not now foresee? The most imminent of these is the birth of a Commercial Feudalism, or the Monopoly of Commerce and Industry by large joint-stock companies, leagued together for the purpose of usurping and controlling all branches of industrial relations. Extremes meet; and the greater the extent to which anarchical competition is carried, the nearer is the approach to the reign of universal Monopoly, which is the opposite excess. It is the fate of Civilization to be always balancing between extremes. Circumstances are tending toward the organization of the commercial classes into federal companies or affiliated monopolies, which, operating in conjunction with the great landed interest, will reduce the middle and laboring classes to a state of commercial vassalage, and, by the influence of combined action, will become master of the productive industry of entire nations. The small operators will be forced, indirectly, to dispose of their products according to the wishes of these monopolists; they will become mere agents, working for the mercantile coalition. We shall thus see the reappearance of feudalism in an inverse order, founded on mercantile leagues and answering to the baronial leagues of the Middle Ages.

  Everything is concurring to produce this result. The spirit of commercial monopoly and financial speculation has extended even to the great; the old nobility, ruined and dispossessed, seek distraction in financial speculations. The descendants of the old Knights excel in the mysteries of the Ready Reckoner and in the manœuvres of the stock market, as their chivalrous ancestors excelled at the tournaments. Public opinion prostrates itself before the bankers and financiers, who in the capitals share authority with the government, and devise every day new means for the monopoly and control of Industry.

  We are marching with rapid strides toward a Commercial Feudalism, and to the fourth Phase of Civilization. The philosophers, accustomed to reverence everything which comes in the name and under the sanction of commerce, will see this new Order spring up without alarm, and will consecrate their servile pens to celebrating its praises. Its début will be one of brilliant promise, but the result will be an Industrial Inquisition, subordinating the whole people to the interests of the affiliated monopolists. Thus, the philosophers, within a brief period, will have permitted the social Movement to retrograde in two ways; first, by the violent Revolution which in 1793 conducted Europe rapidly toward Barbarism, and, second, by the commercial anarchy and license which at the present day are causing a rapid decline toward the Feudal Order. Such are the melancholy results of our confidence in social guides who have no other object than to raise themselves by political intrigues to position and fortune. Philosophy needed some new subject to replace the old theological controversies, which it had completely exhausted; it was therefore to the Golden Calf, to Commerce, that it turned its eyes, making it an object of social idolatry and scholastic dispute.

  It is no longer to the Muses nor to their votaries, but to Traffic and its heroes that Fame now consecrates her hundred voices. We hear no longer of Wisdom, of Virtue, of Morality; all that has fallen into contempt, and incense is now burnt only on the altar of Commerce. The true grandeur of a nation, its only glory, according to the economists, is to sell to neighboring nations more cloths and calicoes than we purchase of them. France, always infatuated with novelties, inclines before the folly of the day, so that now no one can think or write except in praise of august Commerce. Even the great are slaves to this mania; a minister who wishes to become popular must promise to every village—“un Commerce immense et un immense Commerce”; a nobleman journeying through the provinces must announce himself in every town as a friend of Commerce, traveling for the good of Commerce. The savants of the nineteenth century are those who explain to us the mysteries of the stock market. Poesy and the fine arts are disdained, and the Temple of Fame is open no longer except to those who tell us why sugars are “feeble,” why soap is “firm.” Since philosophy has conceived a passion for Commerce, Polyhymnia decks the new science with flowers. The tenderest expressions have replaced the old language of the merchants, and it is now said, in elegant phrase, that “sugars are languid”—that is, are falling; that “soaps are looking up”—that is, have advanced. Formerly, pernicious manœuvres like monopoly and speculation excited the indignation of writers; but now these schemes are a title to distinction, and France announces them in a Pindaric strain, saying: “A rapid and unexpected movement has suddenly taken place in soaps”—at which words we seem to see bars of soap leap from their boxes and wing their way to the clouds, while the speculators in soap hear their names resound through the whole land. Whatever Commerce touches, were it only a stock certificate or a quintal of fish, the philosophers speak of in sublime style and in accents of delight. Under their pens, a cask of rum becomes a flask of rose-water, cheese exhales the perfume of the violet, and soap rivals the whiteness of the lily. All these flowers of rhetoric contribute, doubtless, to the success of Industry, which has found in the support of the Philosophers the same kind of assistance they have extended to the people, namely, fine phrases, but not results.

  When were there so many abuses, so much anarchy in the industrial world as now, when the mercantile policy is in the ascendant? Because an insular nation, favored by the commercial indolence of France, has enriched itself by monopoly and maritime spoliation, behold all the old doctrines of philosophy disdained, Commerce extolled as the only road to truth, to wisdom, and to happiness, and the merchants become the pillars of the state, while all the continental Cabinets vie with each other in their submission to a Power which suborns them with the profits she has levied upon their people. One is ready to believe in magic on seeing kings and empires thus circumvented by a few commercial sophisms, and exalting to the skies the race of monopolists, stockjobbers, agioteurs, and other industrial corsairs, who employ their influence in concentrating masses of capital, in producing fluctuations in the price of products, in ruining alternately all branches of industry, and in impoverishing the producing classes, who are spoliated en masse by vast monopolies, as we herrings engulfed in the jaws of a whale.

  To sum up:—I have already stated, in course of the discussion, what would be the effect of Collective Competition, which is the antidote of the present system:—

    The above synopsis will create a desire for an entire chapter on Collective Competition, but I have already said that the object of this preliminary essay is only to expose the ignorance of our social and political guides, and to explain the ends they should have had in view in their investigations. For the rest, of what use would it be to stop to explain the means of perfecting Civilization by measures, such as Collective Competition, borrowed from the sixth Period? What signifies to us the ameliorations of the sixth or seventh Periods, since we can overleap them both and pass immediately to the eighth, which therefore alone merits our attention?

  When we shall have reached this Period, when we shall enjoy fully the happiness of the Combined Order, we can reason on the abuses of civilization and their correctives at our ease. It is then that we may amuse ourselves with an analysis of the Civilized mechanism, which is the most curious of all, since it is that in which there is the greatest complication and confusion of elements. As for the present, the question is not to study, not to improve Civilization, but to quit it; it is for this reason that I shall not cease to fix the mind on the necessity of rejecting all half measures, and of going straight to the proposed end by founding, without delay, an Association based upon the Serial order—an Association which, by furnishing a demonstration of Passional Harmony, will remove the philosophic cataract from the eyes of the human race, and raise all the nations of the globe—Civilized, Barbaric, and Savage—to their social destiny,—to Universal Unity.