They would have been very indignant, however, if anyone had charged them with desiring to create an artificial society. On the contrary, their claim was that the present social environment is artificial, and that their business was not to create but merely to discover that other environment which is already so wonderfully adapted to the true needs of mankind in virtue of its providential, natural harmony. At bottom it is the same idea as the “natural order” of the Physiocrats, much as their conception differs from that of the Physiocrats—an incidental proof that the order is anything but “natural,” seeing that it varies with those who define it. Some of their sayings, however, might very well have been borrowed directly from Quesnay or Mercier de la Rivière—for example, that of Owen’s in which he speaks of the commune as God’s special agent for bringing society into harmony with nature. It is just the “good despot” of the Physiocrats over again. Or take Fourier’s comparison in which he ranks himself with Newton as the discoverer of the law of “attraction of passion,” and believes that his “stroke of genius,” as Zola calls it, lies in knowing how to utilise the passions which God has given us to the best advantage. What is still more interesting is that this newer socialism marks a veritable reaction against the principles of 1789.[508] The Revolutionists hated every form of association, and suspected it of being a mere survival of the old _régime_, a chain to bind the individual. Not only was it omitted from the Declaration of the Rights of Man,[509] but it was formally prohibited in every province—prohibitions which have been withdrawn only quite recently. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast to the spirit of the Revolution than the beliefs which inspired Owen, Fourier, and Cabet, the founders of the new order. But the men of 1789 were not so far wrong, nor were they deceived by their recollections of corporations and guilds, when they expressed the belief that any form of association was really a menace to liberty. There is an old Italian proverb which states that every man who has an associate has also a master. The Liberal school has to a certain extent always shared these apprehensions, and ample justification might be found for them in the many despotic acts of associates, whether capitalists or workmen.