If the level of the human race is not continually rising, man is not a perfectible being.
If the social tendency is not a constant approximation of all men towards this progressive elevation, the economic laws are not harmonious.
Now, how can the level of humanity be rising, if each given quantity of labour does not yield a constantly increasing amount of enjoyments, a phenomenon which can be explained only by the transformation of onerous into gratuitous utility.
And, on the other hand, how can this utility, having become gratuitous, bring men nearer and nearer to a common level, if the utility has not at the same time itself become common?
Here, then, we discover the essential law of social harmony.
I should have been pleased had the language of Political Economy furnished me with two words other than the terms production and consumption, to designate services which are rendered and received. These terms savour too much of materiality. There are evidently services, like those of the clergyman, the professor, the soldier, the artist, which tend to the furtherance of morality, education, security, taste, which have nothing in common with mechanical or manufacturing industry, except this, that the end to be attained is satisfaction or enjoyment.
The terms I have referred to are those generally employed, and I have no wish to become a neologist. But let it be understood that by production I mean what confers utility, and by consumption the enjoyment to which that utility gives rise.
Let the protectionist school—which is in reality a phase of Communism—believe that in employing the terms producer and consumer we are not absurd enough to wish to represent the human race as divided into two distinct classes, the one engaged [p324] exclusively in the work of producing, the other exclusively in that of consuming. The naturalist divides the human race into whites and blacks, or into men and women, and the economist, forsooth, is not to classify them as producers and consumers, because, as the protectionist gentlemen sagely remark, producer and consumer make but one person!