ABSTRACT
The common aim of the city is the moral, intellectual and physical progress of citizens. The commune is made up of artists, scholars and industrialists. Its heads are the foremost artists, the foremost scholars and the foremost industrialists. This is what we wrote in our previous article and we also sought to define these three names: artists, scholars and industrialists by the function and work to which they correspond. In the present social order these three functions exist only in a very imperfect form; we may say that one of the three functions no longer exists since the destruction of industrial corporations, now that receivers, provosts and aldermen no longer exist and the country industrial tribunals have only one or two sessions per year when they deliver verdicts on the material interests of the town. These three functions exist in an imperfect form, and in fact it is the parish priest who moralises, the schoolmaster who teaches and if the mayor retains a few attributions of worldly power, these attributions have become so small, they have been reduced to a simple role of law and order, his influence is so slight considering the town’s wealth that the tax collector has much closer links with industry than the political head of the city. Let us pursue this idea by indicating by these three names the men who in the future will monitor the progress of public morals, education and wealth, and let us see what a priest, a schoolteacher or a mayor will be according to SaintSimon’s ideas: in other words, let us look more closely at what priests, scholars and industrialists must be in order to bind, enlighten and enrich society. In the current political situation, much more attention is paid to mayors than to parish priests or schoolmasters for a simple reason. The current government is the representative, the direct heir of temporal power, that is to say the military power which, since the Gospels, has had neither the capacity nor the power to organise moral education or even the people’s scientific education. This lofty mission was for many centuries that of the spiritual society, that is to say the Catholic clergy. By founding academies, extending their patronage to the university and, in a word, taking over public education, kings contributed powerfully and happily to the ruin of this clergy’s influence; but as they understand the trend
of humanity no better than the clergy, they were unable to replace it. This is why the moral action of those governing on those governed is so insignificant and why, for example, we can defy the three constitutional powers together to replace the simplest country parish priest by one of their officials. This is why actual teaching, remaining up until a certain point in the hands of the government, has often risen up against the usurpation of numerous attacks either from those prompted by a pure feeling of freedom, or from the Church trying to take back the ancient privilege that Jesus had given it of teaching the people. Nowadays the men who moralise and those who teach give way in our policy to those who administrate or supervise, manage and often counter material interests; let us put aside the priest and the schoolteacher in order to focus on the mayor.
