The economical organization is to be based on the maxims, “To each one according to his capacity,” and “To each capacity according to its work.”  Private property is to be retained, but its transmission by inheritance or testamentary disposition must be abolished.  The property is to be held by a tenure resembling that of gavel-kind.  It belongs to the community, and the priests, chiefs, or brehons, as the Celtic tribes call them, to distribute it for life to individuals, and to each individual according to his capacity.  It was supposed that in this way the advantages of both common and individual property might be secured.  Something of this prevailed originally in most nations, and a reminiscence of it still exists in the village system among the Slavonic tribes of Russia and Poland; and nearly all jurists maintain that the testamentary right by which a man disposes of his goods after his natural death, as well as that by which a child inherits from the parent, is a municipal, not a natural right.

The most striking feature in the Saint-Simonian scheme was the rank and position it assigned to woman.  It asserted the absolute equality of the sexes, and maintained that either sex is incomplete without the other.  Man is an incomplete individual without woman.  Hence a religion, a doctrine, a social institution founded by one sex alone is incomplete, and can never be adequate to the wants of the race or a definite order.  This idea was also entertained by Frances Wright, and appears to be entertained by all our Women’s Rights folk of either sex.  The old civilization was masculine, not male and female as God made man.  Hence its condemnation.  The Saint-Simonians, therefore, proposed to place by the side of their sovereign Father at the summit of their hierarchy a sovereign Mother.  The man to be sovereign Father they found; but a woman to be sovereign Mother, Mere Supreme, they found not.  This caused great embarrassment, and a split between Bazard and Enfantin.  Bazard was about marrying his daughter, and he proposed to place her marriage under the protection of the existing French laws.  Enfantin opposed his doing so, and called it a sinful compliance with the prejudices of the world.  The Saint-Simonian society, he maintained, was a State, a kingdom within itself, and should be governed by its own laws and its own chiefs without any recognition of those without.  Bazard persisted, and had the marriage of his daughter solemnized in a legal manner, and for aught I know, according to the rites of the Church.  A great scandal followed.  Bazard charged Enfantin with denying Christian marriage, and with holding loose notions on the subject.  Enfantin replied that he neither denied nor affirmed Christian marriage; that in enacting the existing law on the subject man alone had been consulted, and he could not recognize it as law till woman had given her consent to it.  As yet the society was only provisionally organized, inasmuch as they had not yet found the