There lies the great mischief of promulgating these impracticable theories of Communism. All is taught as being done for the individual. The egregious error is committed of trusting all to a certain organisation of society, which is to be a substitute for the moral efforts of individual man. Patience, fortitude, self-sacrifice, a high sense of imperative duty, are supposed to be rendered unnecessary in a scheme of things which, if it were possible, would require these virtues in a pre-eminent degree. The virtuous enthusiast would find himself, indeed, utterly mistaken--the stage which he thought prepared for the exhibition of the serenest virtues, would be a scene given up to mere animal life: but still, if he limited himself to the teaching of these virtues--of a godlike temperance, and a perpetual self-negation--it is not probable, indeed, that he would find many disciples; neither is it easy to see that any great mischief could ensue. Every community, where possessions have been in common, which has at all succeeded, has been sustained by religious zeal--the most potent of all sentiments, and one extraneous to the framework of society. French Communism is the product of idleness and sensuality, provoked into ferocity by commercial distress; clamouring for means of self-indulgence _from the state_, and prepared to extort its claim by any amount of massacre. Thus we have shown that the work of M. Prudhon, with its _contradictions_, or laws of good and of evil, tends but to illustrate the inevitable rise and unalterable nature of our social pyramid. This was our object, and here must end our present labours on M. Prudhon. If our readers are disappointed that they have not heard more of his own schemes for the better construction of society--that they have not learned more of the mystery concealed under the famous paradox that has been blown about by all the winds of heaven--_la propriété c'est le vol!_--we can only say that we have not learned more ourselves. Moreover, we are fully persuaded he has nothing to teach. All his strength lies in exposing evils he cannot remedy, and destroying the schemes of greater quacks than himself. That property itself is not the subject of his attack, but the mode in which that property is determined, is all that we can gather. The value of every object of exchange is to be determined by the labour bestowed upon it; and the property in it, we presume, is to be decreed to him whose labour has been bestowed. But capital has been justly defined as accumulated labour; he who supplies capital supplies labour. We are brought back, therefore, to the old difficulty of adjusting (by any other standard than the relative proportion which capital and labour bear at any time in the market) the claims of capital and labour. Any such equitable adjustment, by a legislative interference, we may safely pronounce to be impossible. FOOTNOTES: