[561] “Your want of faith in association,” he wrote to the National Assembly of 1848, “will force you to expose civilisation to a terribly agonising death.”
[562] L’Humanité (1840). It would be wrong to conclude, however, that this desire for secularising charity meant that Leroux was anti-religious. On the contrary, he admits his indebtedness for the conception of solidarity to the dictum of St. Paul, “We are all members of one body.”
[563] “I was the first to employ the term ‘socialism.’ It was a neologism then, but a very necessary term. I invented the word as an antithesis to ‘individualism.’” (Grève de Samarez, p. 288.) As a matter of fact, as far back as 1834 he had contributed an article entitled De l’Individualisme et du Socialisme to the Revue encyclopédique. The same word occurs in the same review in an article entitled Discours sur la Situation actuelle de l’Esprit humain, written two years before. See his complete works, vol. i, pp. 121, 161, 378. For a further account of Leroux see M. F. Thomas’s Pierre Leroux (1905), a somewhat dull but highly imaginative production.
[564] For Cabet’s life and the story of Icaria see Prudhommeaux’s two volumes, Étienne Cabet and Histoire de la Communauté icarienne.
[565] “The communists will never gain much success until they have learned to reform themselves. Let them preach by example and by the exercise of social virtues, and they will soon convert their adversaries.”
[566] Protection was attacked by Sismondi in Nouv. Princ., Book IV, chap. 11. He considered it a fruitful source of over-production, and uttered his condemnation of the absurd desire of nations for self-sufficiency. Saint-Simon considered Protection to be the outcome of international hatred (Œuvres, vol. iii, p. 36), and commended the economists who had shown that “mankind had but one aim and that its interests were common, and consequently that each individual in his social connection must be viewed as one of a company of workers” (Lettres à un Americaine, Œuvres, vol. ii, pp. 186-187). The Saint-Simonians never touched upon the question directly, but it is quite clear that Protective rights were to have no place in the universal association of which they dreamt. According to Fourier, there was to be the completest liberty in the circulation of goods among the Phalanstères all the world over. (Cf. Bourgin, Fourier, pp. 326-329; Paris, 1905.)
[567] We refer to two of them only: Augustin Cournot and Louis Say of Nantes. The former, in his Recherches sur les Principes mathématiques de la Théorie des Richesses (1838), a work that is celebrated to-day but which passed unnoticed at the time of its publication, has criticised the theory of Free Trade. But the reputation which he subsequently achieved was not based upon this part of the book. Louis Say (1774-1840) was a brother of J. B. Say. He published a number of works, now quite forgotten, in which he criticised several doctrines upheld by his brother, whose displeasure he thus incurred. We refer to his last work, Études sur la Richesse des Nations et Réfutation des principales Erreurs en Économie politique (1836), for this is the work to which List alludes. It is probable that Louis Say’s name would have remained in oblivion but for List. Richelot, in his translation of List (second edition, p. 477), quotes some of the more important passages of Say’s book.
[568] The union of England and Scotland dates from 1707. Compare the passage in Adam Smith, Book V, chap. 2, part ii, art. 4; Cannan’s edition, vol. ii, p. 384.
[569] List, Werke, ed. Häusser, vol. ii, p. 17. The seventh edition of the National System, which was published in 1883 by M. Eheberg, contains an excellent historical and critical introduction. Our quotations are from the English translation by Lloyd, published in 1885, republished, with introduction by Professor Shield Nicholson, in 1909.