“I have wept over the poor workman, whose daily bread is already sufficiently uncertain and who has now suffered misery for many years. I have undertaken his defence, but I find that I am powerless to succour him. I have mourned over the _bourgeois_, whose ruin I have witnessed and who has been driven to bankruptcy and goaded to opposition of the proletariat. My personal inclination is to sympathise with the _bourgeois_, but a natural antagonism to his ideas and the play of circumstance have made me his opponent. I have gone in mourning and paid penance for the spirit of the old Republic long before there were any signs of its offspring. This Revolution which was to restore the public order merely marks the beginning of a new departure in social revolution which no one understands.”[664] But the Revolution having once begun, Proudhon did not feel himself justified in being behindhand. He had been a most severe critic of the existing _régime_, and he felt that he was bound to attempt a solution of the practical problems which suddenly came to the front. He became a journalist and threw himself whole-heartedly into the struggle. Hitherto he had been content with vague suggestions as to where the evil lay. But now he was anxious to make reform practicable and to fill in the details of the scheme; and so he invented the Exchange Bank. Proudhon’s exposition of the scheme is contained in a number of pamphlets, in newspapers, and in his books.[665] The explanations do not always tally, and he is not always happy in stating exactly what he thinks. This explains why he has been so often misunderstood. We shall try to give a _résumé_ of his ideas before proceeding to criticise them and to compare them with analogous projects formulated both before and after his time. This will help us to understand where the originality of the scheme lay. The fundamental principle on which the whole scheme rests is somewhat as follows: Of all the forms of capital which allow of a right of escheat to the product of the worker, whether in the form of rent, of interest, or of discount, the most important is money, for it is only in the form of money that these dues are actually paid.[666] If we could suppress the right of escheat in the case of this universal form of capital—in other words, if interest were abolished—the right of escheat in every other case would soon disappear.