What a system is that which leads a business man to think with delight that society will soon be able to dispense with men! MACHINERY HAS DELIVERED CAPITAL FROM THE OPPRESSION OF LABOR! That is exactly as if the cabinet should undertake to deliver the treasury from the oppression of the taxpayers. Fool! though the workmen cost you something, they are your customers: what will you do with your products, when, driven away by you, they shall consume them no longer? Thus machinery, after crushing the workmen, is not slow in dealing employers a counter-blow; for, if production excludes consumption, it is soon obliged to stop itself. During the fourth quarter of 1841 four great failures, happening in an English manufacturing city, threw seventeen hundred and twenty people on the street. These failures were caused by over-production,--that is, by an inadequate market, or the distress of the people. What a pity that machinery cannot also deliver capital from the oppression of consumers! What a misfortune that machines do not buy the fabrics which they weave! The ideal society will be reached when commerce, agriculture, and manufactures can proceed without a man upon earth! In a Yorkshire parish for nine months the operatives have been working but two days a week. Machines! At Geston two factories valued at sixty thousand pounds sterling have been sold for twenty-six thousand. They produced more than they could sell. Machines! In 1841 the number of children UNDER thirteen years of age engaged in manufactures diminishes, because children OVER thirteen take their place. Machines! The adult workman becomes an apprentice, a child, again: this result was foreseen from the phase of the division of labor, during which we saw the quality of the workman degenerate in the ratio in which industry was perfected. In his conclusion the journalist makes this reflection: "Since 1836 there has been a retrograde movement in the cotton industry";--that is, it no longer keeps up its relation with other industries: another result foreseen from the theory of the proportionality of values. Today workmen's coalitions and strikes seem to have stopped throughout England, and the economists rightly rejoice over this return to order,-- let us say even to common sense. But because laborers henceforth--at least I cherish the hope--will not add the misery of their voluntary periods of idleness to the misery which machines force upon them, does it follow that the situation is changed? And if there is no change in the situation, will not the future always be a deplorable copy of the past? The economists love to rest their minds on pictures of public felicity: it is by this sign principally that they are to be recognized, and that they estimate each other. Nevertheless there are not lacking among them, on the other hand, moody and sickly imaginations, ever ready to offset accounts of growing prosperity with proofs of persistent poverty.