“V. No more forestalling, accumulating, regrating, or anarchical competition. Feudal industry is pierced to the heart; let us not allow it to raise itself from the dust.”[[5]]
Such are the proposals to be found in a single journal which represents the ideas that are now fermenting in the mind of France.
These propositions will probably “donnent à penser,” as the French say, to most of our readers. Some of them will perhaps be of opinion that our lively neighbours are getting on at railway speed in the regeneration of society. We recommend their projects to the consideration of the numerous holders of French railway and other stock, in the British islands. They will doubtless get good round sums for their claims of damages against the French government, when it has absorbed all the joint-stock companies of the country!—the more so when it is recollected, 1st, That the damages will be assessed by juries elected by universal suffrage. 2d, That they will be paid by a government appointed by an assembly elected in the same way. We are not surprised, when such ideas are afloat in the ruling and irresistible workmen of Paris, who have just overturned Louis Philippe, at the head of one hundred thousand men, that the French funds have fallen thirty-five per cent in these few days, and railway and other stock in a still greater proportion. The Paris 3 per cents are now (March 18) at 50; the 5 per cents at 72!
Nor let it be said these ideas are the mere dreams of enthusiasts, which never can be carried into practice by any government. These enthusiasts are now the ruling power in the state; their doctrines are those which will quickly be carried into execution by the liberal and enlightened masses, invested by universal suffrage with supreme dominion in the Republic. Most assuredly they will carry their ideas into execution: the seed which the liberal writers of France have been sowing for the last thirty years, will bring forth its appropriate fruits. What power is to prevent the adoption of these popular and highly lauded “improvements,” after the government of Louis Philippe and Guizot has been overturned by their announcement? These persons stood as the barrier between France and the “social revolution” with which it was menaced: when they were destroyed, all means of resisting it are at an end, and the friends of humanity must trust to prevent its extension to other states, mainly to the reaction arising from its experienced effects in the land of its birth.
Already there appears, not merely in the language of the popular journals, but in the official acts of the Provisional Government, decisive evidence that the socialist ideas are about to be carried into execution by the supreme authority in France. On March 1st, there appeared the following decree of the Provisional Government:—
“The Provisional Government, considering that the revolution made by the people should be made for them:
“That it is time to put an end to the long and iniquitous sufferings of the working classes:
“That the question of labour is one of supreme importance:
“That there can be no higher or more dignified preoccupation of the Republican Government:
“That it becomes France to study ardently, and to solve, a problem which now occupies all the states of Europe: