ABSTRACT
The retrospect which has been taken of the character and tendency of the present social system, has afforded abundant proof that there is within this system a principle which must ever doom four-fifths of the community to political and social damnation, under every modification of religion and every form of government. The reviewal entered into has shewn us not only some of the many failures which have followed the efforts of man to alter the present state of things for the better, but it has at the same time made us acquainted with the cause of these failures, and has thus placed the future destiny of man within his own hands. We have seen that this system spontaneously generates inequality of wealth and inequality of power, and that it therefore is, and always must be, subversive of every just political institution and all equality of social rights which may be at any time established. We have discovered, likewise, that inequality of wealth, and the gradation of classes, is produced and maintained by inequality of exchanges; and, however inequality of exchanges may have been originally induced, observation and experience unite in shewing that the principle is now perpetuated by the existence of inequality of wealth in connection with the gradation of classes, or the division of society into capitalists and producers. Inequality of possessions, when considered by itself, and unconnected with inequality of exchanges and the gradation of classes, is not a great evil. To the man whose labour has procured him two suits of clothes, it matters not whether another person has two or four suits, provided this second man have obtained his superfluity by means of exchanging his own labour equally against the labour of some other person. An absolute equality of possessions can no more exist among men, than an absolute equality in regard to strength and stature. In every state of society, there will always be some kind of individual and personal property; and difference of character will ever make such property both unequal and varied.
