“And I anticipate that this delivery will come from machinery itself; the engine that has mangled so many men will come gently and generously to the aid of suffering human flesh. Cruel and hard to begin with, machinery will become kind, favourable and friendly. How can it change its soul? Listen. The spark that flashed from the Leyden jar, the little subtle star that revealed itself in the last century to the wonder-stricken philosopher, will accomplish this miracle. The Unknown which has allowed itself to be conquered without revealing its nature, the mysterious captive force, the intangible, seized by human hands, the obedient lightning, bottled and distributed over the innumerable wires that cover the face of the earth with their network—electricity will yield up its energy, will give its help wherever it is needed: in the houses, the rooms, the homes where father, mother, and children will henceforth never be separated. This is no dream. The cruel machine that crushes soul and body in the factory will become domestic, intimate and familiar. But it is useless, quite useless for the pulleys, wheels, connecting-rods, cranks, bearings and flywheels to become humanized if men themselves remain iron-hearted.
“We are waiting for and appealing to a yet more wonderful change. The day will come when the employer, growing in moral beauty, will become a worker among the liberated workers; when there will be no more wages, but only an exchange in kind. The great manufacturers, like the old nobility, whose place they have taken and whom they are imitating, will go through their 4th of August. They will abandon their disputed profits and threatened privileges. They will become generous when they feel that it is time to be so.
“What says the employer of to-day? That he is the mind and the thought, and that without him his army of workers would be like a body deprived of understanding. Well, if that be true, let him content himself with so much joy and honour. Because a man is thought and soul must he therefore gorge himself with riches? When the great Donatello and his companions designed a bronze statue it was he who was the soul of the creation. He placed the price paid for the work by the prince and the citizens in a basket which hung from a pulley fixed to one of the rafters of the studio, and each of his companions untied the rope and took from the basket what he needed. Is not the joy of creative intelligence enough, and does such an advantage exempt the master worker from sharing the gain with his humble collaborators? But in my Republic there will be no gain, no wages, and all will belong to each.”
“Papa, that’s collectivism,” said Pauline quietly.
“The most precious gifts,” replied Monsieur Bergeret, “are common to all men and have always been so. Air and light are the common property of all that breathes and sees the light of day. After the secular labours of egoism and avarice, in spite of the violent efforts of individuals to seize and keep wealth, the individual possessions enjoyed by the wealthiest among us are little when compared with those that belong without distinction to mankind in general. And even in our society do you not notice that the most beautiful and splendid possessions, such as roads, rivers, forests, which were once royal, libraries and museums, belong to all? Not a single rich man has a greater claim than I to an old oak-tree at Fontainebleau or a picture in the Louvre. And they are more mine than the rich man’s if I can appreciate them better. Collective property, dreaded like some remote monster, is already among us in a thousand familiar forms. When prophesied, it alarms, in spite of the fact that we already enjoy many of the advantages which it affords.
“The Positivists who meet in the house of Auguste Comte, under the leadership of the venerable Monsieur Pierre Laffitte, are in no hurry to become Socialists. But one of them made the judicious remark that all property springs from a social source. Nothing could be truer, for all property acquired by individual effort was created, and subsists, only by the co-operation of the whole community. And since private property springs from a social source we neither forget its origin nor corrupt its essence if we offer it to the community and entrust it to the State upon which it necessarily depends. And what is the State?”
Mademoiselle Bergeret hastened to answer that question:
“The State, papa, is a wretched cross-grained person sitting behind a counter-rail. You must see that no one will want to strip himself naked for such as he.”
“I understand,” said Monsieur Bergeret with a smile. “I have always tried to understand, and in so doing I have wasted much precious energy. I am discovering late in life that not to understand is a great faculty. It sometimes helps you to the conquest of the world. If Napoleon had been as intelligent as Spinoza he would have lived in a garret and written four books. I understand. But to return to this wretched cross-grained man behind the counter-rail, you trust your letters to him, Pauline, letters that you would not trust to the Tricoche Agency. He manages a portion of your property, not the least in extent or in value. He looks gloomy to you, but when he becomes everything he will cease to be anything, or rather he will only be ourselves. Annihilated by his universality, he will cease to appear tiresome. One is no longer wicked, my daughter, when one ceases to exist. What makes him unpleasant to-day is that he encroaches on individual property, that he goes along filing and scratching, taking a little bite from the fat and a big bite from the thin. That makes him unbearable. He is greedy; he is needy. In my Republic he will be without desires, like the gods. He will have all and nothing. We shall not notice him because he will be like ourselves, indistinguishable from ourselves; will be as though he didn’t exist. And when you say that I sacrifice the individual to the State, the living man to an abstraction, I am, on the contrary, subordinating the abstraction to reality, to the State which I suppress, by identifying it with the activities of the whole social organism.
“Even were my Republic never to exist I should be glad that I had played with this idea of it. It is permissible to build in Utopia. And Auguste Comte himself, who flattered himself that he built only on the data of positive science, placed Campanella in the calendar of great men.