CHAPTER IV.
OF THE SOCIAL REPUBLIC.
The Social Republic promises to solve the difficulty.
“All systems, all governments,” it declares, “have been tried and found wanting. My ideas alone are new, and have not yet been put to the test. My day is come.”
This is a mistake. The ideas propounded by the Social Republic are not new. They are as old as the world. They have risen up in the midst of all the great moral and social crises, whether in the East or the West, in the ancient or the modern world. The second and third centuries in Africa, and especially in Egypt, during the agitations caused by the propagation of Christianity—the middle ages during their confused, stormy fermentation—the sixteenth century in Germany, in the course of the Reformation—and the seventeenth in England during the political revolution,—had their Socialists and their Communists, thinking, speaking, and acting precisely like those of our own day. It is a phase of human nature that reappears at epochs when society is like a boiling caldron, in which every ingredient is thrown to the surface and exposed to view.
Till now, it is true, these ideas had only been enounced on a small scale, obscurely and timidly, and were repelled and execrated almost as soon as they saw the light. But now they boldly exhibit themselves, and put forth all their pretensions before the public. It signifies little whether this is by their own strength, by the fault of the public itself, or from causes inherent in the present state of society. Since the Social Republic is proclaimed aloud, we must look at it steadily and endeavour to fathom its lowest depths.
I wish to avoid all circumlocution, to throw aside all disguises, and to go straight to the heart of the idol. Nor is this impossible. For as all the efforts of the Social Republic tend to one end, so all its ideas are the offspring of one fundamental idea.
This fundamental idea is to be found, explicitly or implicitly, in the language of all the leaders of the Social Republic, though all do not avow, and some are perhaps not even conscious that they entertain it. M. Proudhon appears to me the one among them who knows best what he thinks and what he wishes: he appears to show the firmest and most consistent understanding in his detestable dreams.
It is not, however, so firm nor so consistent as it appears, or probably as he himself thinks it. He has not declared, and I doubt if he have perceived, to what his system leads.
His system, nakedly and rigorously stated, is this:—