calls them, that he will allow the law to regain her empire.  Truly, it would be well if these visionaries, who think so much of themselves and so little of mankind, who want to renew everything, would only be content with trying to reform themselves, the task would be arduous enough for them.  In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind.  No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that.  They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law.  They aspire only to make the law.

To show how universal this strange disposition has been in France, I had need not only to have copied the whole of the works of Mably, Raynal, Rousseau, Fenelon, and to have made long extracts from Bossuet and Montesquieu, but to have given the entire transactions of the sittings of the Convention, I shall do no such thing, however, but merely refer the reader to them.

It is not to be wondered at that this idea should have suited Buonaparte exceedingly well.  He embraced it with ardour, and put it in practice with energy.  Playing the part of a chemist, Europe was to him the material for his experiments.  But this material reacted against him.  More than half undeceived, Buonaparte, at St. Helena, seemed to admit that there is an initiative in every people, and he became less hostile to liberty.  Yet this did not prevent him from giving this lesson to his son in his will:—­“To govern, is to diffuse morality, education, and well-being.”

After all this, I hardly need show, by fastidious quotations, the opinions of Morelly, Babeuf, Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier.  I shall confine myself to a few extracts from Louis Blanc’s book on the organisation of labour.

“In our project, society receives the impulse of power.” (Page 126.)

In what does the impulse which power gives to society consist?  In imposing upon it the project of M. Louis Blanc.

On the other hand, society is the human race.  The human race, then, is to receive its impulse from M. Louis Blanc.

It is at liberty to do so or not, it will be said.  Of course the human race is at liberty to take advice from anybody, whoever it may be.  But this is not the way in which M. Louis Blanc understands the thing.  He means that his project should be converted into law, and, consequently, forcibly imposed by power.

“In our project, the State has only to give a legislation to labour, by means of which the industrial movement may and ought to be accomplished in all liberty.  It (the State) merely places society on an incline (that is all) that it may descend, when once it is placed there, by the mere force of things, and by the natural course of the established mechanism.”

But what is this incline?  One indicated by M. Louis Blanc.  Does it not lead to an abyss?  No, it leads to happiness.  Why, then, does not society go there of itself?  Because it does not know what it wants, and it requires an impulse.  What is to give it this impulse?  Power.  And who is to give the impulse to power?  The inventor of the machine, M. Louis Blanc.