All labor becomes pleasant to man, as nature meant it should be. It is only when he is forced to do a kind which he does not like, or is obliged to over-work, that productive exertion becomes repulsive. This is avoided in the phalanxes, as each one is allowed to follow his own bent, being at perfect liberty to join any group of laborers or to change from group to group as he may see fit. In fact, the desire for change—the passion _papillonne_, or _alternante_—is so strong that at the expiration of two hours a change is usually made from one kind of labor to another. Work of this character becomes play, and children like it, while men are as fond of it as of athletic sports. We now discover men undergoing severe physical exertion for the sake of excelling in running, swimming, wrestling, rowing, etc. There will spring up a similar rivalry between groups of cultivators in the phalanxes. One set of laborers will endeavor to obtain more useful products from ten or one hundred acres than another similar group from the same extent of land of like quality. We find such a rivalry at present among cultivators of the soil, and it might undoubtedly be increased in organizations such as Fourier described. Every fall you see it reported in local papers that farmer A has raised, let us say, four hundred bushels of oats from ten acres; this at once provokes B to inform the world that his ten acres yielded five hundred bushels. C may report five hundred and fifty bushels in the coming year. This demonstrates the existence of a rivalry of a valuable kind, of which much might be made. But Fourier pushed things to an extreme when he thought that the productiveness of labor might thereby be increased fourfold, or even fivefold. He held that a man could produce enough under his social _régime_ from his eighteenth to twenty-eighth year, so that he could pass the remainder of his life in elegant leisure. He maintained, too, that if England should introduce his socialistic phalanxes her labor would become so productive that she could pay off her national debt in six months by the sale of hens’ eggs. This is what he says on this point: “It is not by millions, but by billions, that we shall value the product of small objects which are to-day despised. It is now the turn of eggs to play a grand _rôle_, and resolve a problem before which those learned in European finance have grown pale. They only know how to increase public indebtedness. We are going to extinguish the colossal English debt on a fixed day with half of the eggs produced during a single year. We shall not lay violent hands on a single fowl, and the work of accomplishing our purpose, instead of being burdensome, will be an amusement for the globe. “Let us make an arithmetical calculation. We wish to pay a debt of twenty-five billions during the year 1835, with hen’s eggs.