Here the leaders of the Social Republic differ greatly among themselves. Some recommend slow and gentle measures; others urge prompt and decisive ones. Some have recourse to political means--for example, a certain organization of existence and labour in common; others try to invent economical and financial expedients--for example, a series of measures designed gradually to destroy the net revenue of property, whether in land or capital, and thus to render property itself useless and illusory. But all these schemes originate in the same design and tend to the same result; the abolition or the nullification of personal, domestic, and hereditary property; and of all institutions, social or political, which are based upon personal, domestic, and hereditary property. Such, through all the diversity, obscurity, ambiguity, and contradiction of the ideas which circulate among the adherents of the Social Republic, is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of all these systems; such is the end they pursue, and hope to attain. But the following truths are forgotten by M. Proudhon and his friends. Mankind is not merely a series of individuals called men; it is a race, which has a common life, and a general and progressive destiny. This is the distinctive character of man, which he alone of created beings possesses. And why is this? It is because human individuals are not isolated, nor confined to themselves, and to the point they occupy in space or time. They are connected with each other; they act upon each other, by ties and by means which do not require their presence, and which outlive them. Hence the successive generations of men are linked together in unbroken succession. The permanent union and progressive development which are the consequences of this unbroken succession of man to man, and generation to generation, characterize the human race. They constitute its peculiarity and its greatness, and mark man for sovereignty in this world, and for immortality beyond it. From this are derived, and by this are founded, the family and the state, property and inheritance, country, history, glory, all the facts and all the sentiments which constitute the extended and perpetual life of mankind, amidst the bounded appearance and rapid disappearance of individual men. In the Social Republic all this ceases to exist. Men are mere isolated and ephemeral beings, who appear in this life, and on this earth the scene of life, only to take their subsistence and their pleasure, each for himself alone, each by the same right, and without any end or purpose beyond.