"What do you say? we will do good! you must tell me about that, father, and I will be all ears! What is the blessing with which we will endow mankind?"
"You ask the question! In heaven's name, what divine mystery do you expect to find in human affairs? We shall have bestowed upon a whole province the benefits of industrial activity! Are we not already on the way? Is not work the source and sustenance of work? do we not employ more men here in a day than agriculture and the petty uncivilized trades that I propose to put down used to employ in a month? Do they not receive higher wages? Are they not in a fair way to acquire the spirit of order, prudence, sobriety, all the virtues that they lack? Where are these virtues, the poor man's only blessing, concealed? In absorbing work, in salutary fatigue and in proportionate wages. The good mechanic has the family spirit, respect for property, submission to the laws, economy, and the habit and the advantages of saving. Idleness, with all the wretched arguments it engenders, is what ruins him. Keep him busy, overwhelm him with work; he is strong, and will become stronger; he will cease to dream of overturning society. He will become orderly in his conduct, his house will be well kept, he will introduce comfort and tranquillity there. And if he lives to be old and infirm, however willing you may be to assist him, it will not be necessary. He will have thought of the future himself; he will no longer need alms and a protector like your friend Jappeloup the vagabond; he will be really a free man. There is no other way to save the people, Emile. I am sorry to tell you that it will take longer to carry out this plan than to conceive a fine Utopian scheme; but if it be a long and hard undertaking, it is worthy of a philosopher like you, and I do not consider it beyond the strength of a hard worker of my sort."
"What! is that the whole ideal of industry?" said Emile, crushed by this conclusion. "Have the people no other future than incessant toil, for the benefit of a class that is never to work at all?"
"That is not my idea," Monsieur Cardonnet replied; "I hate and despise idlers; that is why I don't like poets and metaphysicians. I think that everybody should work according to his powers, and my ideal, as that word seems to please you, is not far removed from that of the Saint-Simonians: 'To every one according to his capacity,' recompense proportioned to desert. But in these days the manufacturing industry has not yet become so firmly established that we can think about a moral system of subdivision. We must look at what is and not speculate as to what is possible. The whole movement of the age tends toward manufacturing. Let it reign and triumph then; let all men work, some with the arm, some with the brain; it is for him who has more brain than arm to direct the others: it is his right and his duty to make a fortune. His wealth becomes sacred, since it is destined to increase in order that there may be more work and higher wages. Society should lend a hand therefore in every way to establish the power of the sagacious man; his sagacity is a public blessing; and he himself should struggle constantly to increase his activity; it is his duty, his religion, his philosophy. In short he must be rich in order to keep growing richer, as you said, Emile, not realizing that you were uttering the most valuable of axioms."
"So, father, you would give to a man only as long as he works? Pray, do you make no account of the man who cannot work?"
"I find in wealth the means of assisting the infirm and the insane."
"But the sluggard?"
"I try to correct him, and if I fail, I turn him over to the law, since he is certain before long to become a nuisance and to incur its penalties."
"In a perfectly constituted society that might be just, because the sluggard would be a monstrous exception; but in exercising authority according to such strict rules as yours, when you demand from the workingman all his strength, all his time, all his thoughts, all his life, ah! how many would be dismissed as sluggards and abandoned to their fate!"
"With the advantages accruing from the increase of manufacturing, we should very soon succeed in increasing the well-being of the poorer classes to such an extent that we could easily found schools where their children would be taught the love of work at almost no expense."