8.--Every individual whose account-book balance is to his credit will be able to obtain credit account-book for a maximum sum equivalent to this balance, if he offers a corresponding mortgage either as before stated, on an existing property, or on property he may acquire by means of the sum thus inscribed to the credit of his account-book. * * * * * What has preceded shows how simple, unobtrusive, passive is the part played by the accountant-general. The books containing the figures signifying what transactions have been effected either to the credit or debit side, with the figures attached identifying those who have made the transactions, are remitted to him. He adds up the credit and debit account and, if there is a balance, enters it to the account of the possessor of the account-book. That is all. If he comes across mistakes or errors, he rectifies them, notably if he discovers that the statements of the account-books do not agree with the corresponding statements of the account-books of those whose transactions appear there. The accountant-general acts as a piece of machinery would act. He is a recorder of figures, _a registrar of balances_. If there are no balances to enter he does not even make a registration, and is then only a _legal witness_ of transactional operations. No more is asked of him in order to arrive at the suppression, pure and simple of the monetary system. But from the day in which the comptabilist system becomes legal to the exclusion of the monetary system, from the moment in which each individual has his personal account introduced into the registers of the accountant-general, his _transactional life_ is henceforth, and for ever, represented on the one side by the mortgages and guarantees that he furnishes in order to obtain comptabilist unities, on the other hand by the balances of his account books that the accountant enters successively and indefinitely to his account. If the whole fortune of each person were treated in such a manner, and it is this we foresee must be the legal situation in the definitely social state (having for sole tax the succession duty, etc., etc.), it is plain that the true function of the accountant-general would be that of recorder of the state, of the shifting social position of each person, the determiner of the diagram of his active, relatively effective life. Each individual would thus have the stereotype of his effective social life cast; each social being would have his effective life formulated, if one may so speak, _by relation_, always by relations, nothing but by relations--to that of all the rest, but in figures, and yet again, in nothing but figures. And herein is seen clearly the fundamental error or profound confusion of those who believe there can be any other thing in the social problem which occupies us than what has just been stated; of those who imagine that capital or fortune must be able at _every