ABSTRACT

In our last article we showed how in accordance with the new principle of association, it was necessary for the government, for material needs, to be turned into a pure industrial administration, into a bank responsible for fulfilling the needs of production and consumption through a clever DISTRIBUTION of workers, instruments and products. This transformation appeared to us to be a rigorous consequence of the principle we proclaimed: for as soon as idleness disappears, and with it the antagonism of classes and individuals, the only function of those chosen to manage material interests must also be to unceasingly improve working conditions and to multiply for all, according to the merits of each, the pleasures brought by material riches. However rigorous this demonstration in itself, it is not enough; for to give men faith in a new organisation, it is not enough to show them the usefulness, they need to be shown the possibility. It is not enough that it conforms to the future they hope for; it must be linked to the past they respect; they must be able to see in the present the foundations on which the longed-for edifice is to be built. If we look carefully at the most significant political facts of our time, that is to say at those which concern the interests of work, we soon discover that the many germs need only to be inseminated in order to give birth to the new institutions which we have outlined. Banks, indeed, are becoming more and more governmental in nature. As for the government, it tends to become more and more a supreme bank and, as a consequence of this double movement, society in its natural constitution is drawing closer and closer to the Saint-Simonian order. In a letter which we addressed to the head of one of our main banking establishments a few months ago, we reviewed the different financial foundations with which society has, without knowing it, long been preparing the future we promise it. We reproduce here the letter as it was then written, merely pointing out in a few notes the new justifications which events, in their march towards progress, have brought to our forecasts. We hope that positive men, those who today by a wholly understandable prejudice accept only the authority of facts, and refuse everything resulting from theory, which is a theory in itself, that of fatality, will at least admit that the facts are also in our favour and that society is clearly announcing by its trends that it is ready to receive us.