We need not point out the practical impossibility of realizing such a system. Let us confine ourselves to showing its essential vice. If communism means absolute equality (and true communism does), it destroys the main inducement to work: for man assured of his living by the State, has nothing left to stimulate him to personal effort. Work, deprived of the hope of a legitimate remuneration, would be reduced to a strict minimum, and civilization, which lives by work, would rapidly go backward: general wretchedness would be the necessary consequence of this state of things; all would be equally poor and miserable; humanity would go back to its primitive state, to get from which it struggled so hard, and from which it emerged by means of work and property alone. Moreover, as it is absolutely impossible to dispense with work, the State would be obliged to enforce it upon those whom their interest did not spontaneously incline to it; from being free, work would become servile, and the pensioners of the State would in reality be but its slaves. As to the inequality-communism (_communisme inégalitaire_) which recommends a remuneration from the State, proportioned to merit and products, that is to say, to _capacity_ and _works_, it certainly does not so very seriously impair the principle of property and liberty; but, on the one hand, it does not satisfy the instincts of equality,[21] which have at all times inspired the communistic utopias; on the other, it attacks the family instincts by suppressing inheritance; now, if man is interested in his own fate, he interests himself still more, as he grows old, in the fate of his children; in depriving him of the responsibility for their destinies, you deprive him of the most energetic stimulus to work; and the tendency would be, though in a lesser degree, to produce the same evil of general impoverishment, as would communism properly so called. But the principal vice of all communism, whether of equality or inequality, is to substitute the State for the individual, to make of all men functionaries, to commit to the State the destinies of all individuals; in one word, to make of the State a providence.[22] =35. Inequality of riches.=--Yet there will always arise in the mind a grave problem: Why are goods created for all, distributed in so unequal and capricious a manner? Why the rich and the poor? and if inequality must exist, why is it not in proportion to inequality of merit and individual work? Why are the idle and prodigal sometimes rich? Why are the poor overwhelmed by both work and poverty? There are two questions here: 1. Why is there any inequality at all? 2. Why, supposing this inequality must exist, has it no connection with merit or the work of the individual?