18

DISTURBING CAUSES

In what state would human society have been had the transactions of mankind never been in any shape infected with force or fraud, oppression or deceit?

Would Justice and Liberty have given rise inevitably to Inequality and Monopoly?

19

WAR

Of all the circumstances that contribute to impart to I nations their distinctive character and aspect, and to form and modify their genius, their moral condition, their customs, and their laws, the one that exerts a far more powerful influence than all the rest, because it includes all the rest, is the manner in which they provide for their subsistence. For this observation we are indebted to Charles Comte, and we have reason to be surprised that it has not had a more prominent place given to it in the moral and political sciences.

20

RESPONSIBILITY

There is a leading idea which runs through the whole of this work, which pervades and animates every page and every line of it; and that idea is embodied in the opening words of the Christian Creed—I believe in God.

21

SOLIDARITY

If man were perfect, if he were infallible, society would present a very different harmony from that which is the subject of our inquiries. Ours is not the society of Fourier. It does not exclude evil; it admits dissonances; only we assert that it does not cease to be harmony if these dissonances pave the way to concord, and bring us back to it.

22

SOCIAL MOTIVE FORCE

It belongs to no human science to assign the ultimate reason of things.

Man suffers; society suffers. We ask why? This is to ask why God has been pleased to endow man with sensibility and free will. As regards this, no one knows more than the revelation in which he has faith has taught him.

But whatever may have been the designs of God, what human science can take as its point of departure is a positive fact, namely, that man has been created free and endowed with feeling.

23

EXISTENCE OF EVIL

In these last days science has retrograded and been driven back. It has been bent and twisted under the obligation imposed upon it, if I may so speak, of denying the existence of Evil under pain of being convicted of denying the existence of God.

Writers whose business it is to display exquisite sensibility, unbounded philanthropy, and unrivaled devotion to religion, have got into the way of saying, “Evil cannot enter into the providential plan. Suffering is no ordinance of God and nature, but comes from human institutions.”

24

25

RELATIONSHIP OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND RELIGION

A phenomenon is always found placed between two other phenomena, one of which is its efficient, and the other its final cause; and science has not done with that phenomenon as long as either of these relations remains undeveloped.

INDEX

Abundance

as poverty, 194

favoring consumers, 177

harming producers, 177

scarcity vs., 175–83, 192, 343–44

Accounting. See Value

Accounts

commercial, 223–24

Accumulation. See Value

Action, human. See Individualism; Mankind

Activity, 478

Agriculture, 147–49, 194–95, 210, 248

analogy to society, 77

example of value of, 729

Persian, 70

Alexander the Great, 668

Algeria, 37–41, 96, 383

Alphonsus, King, 459

Anarchy, 217, 471

Animals