ABSTRACT
Gentlemen, In our last session we reviewed the progress of workers, manufacturers, tradesmen and farmers and the decrease in the importance and the wealth of the idle. By looking at the past we showed you the constant fall in the income of idle owners, interest and rents. We went back over the causes which had encouraged the development of the property industry and which had slowed down that of the agricultural industry. We also set out the ways of giving an equal impetus to these two important divisions of work. For the property industry, we explained that the present constitution of banks had become corrupt and was no longer in keeping with new needs. In fact the Bank of France, managed by capitalist bankers, is unfaithful to its mission; it exploits its privilege in the interest of its shareholders rather than that of the workers, as it refuses to apply a generally called-for reduction in its discount rate. Individual isolated bankers are incapable of giving a direction to the industry, of establishing a balance between all the branches of production in order to protect producers from the crises which periodically occur, and plant trouble and ruin in their ranks. In a word, banks are not yet organised in a way favourable to sharing out all the instruments among the workers with discernment and skill, and guaranteeing them the best possible conditions: ensuring, above all, that none of them is deprived of those which he is the most capable of exploiting, which means, in other words, trying to classify men according to their merits. The credit means used today have barely progressed. They are still those discovered by the first trading towns of the Middle Ages. We promised to explain to you the transformation which the current banking system must undergo in order to accelerate the successive decline of idleness, to gradually improve the workers’ conditions in order to finally give them sole disposal of the capital which they alone know how to render productive. This is what we intend to do today; we shall also tell you how competition and disorder may be replaced by partnership and order.
