ABSTRACT
We have laid out the conditions required for industrial work to reach the highest degree of order and prosperity; we have indicated the direction for the forthcoming progress of the banking system to follow in order to achieve this objective. It will now be easy to have an initial idea of the social institution of the future, which, in the interests of all society and particularly in the interests of pacific and industrious workers, will regulate all industries. We will provisionally name this institution the general system of banks, while having reservations about the narrow interpretation which could today be given to this term. This system would first include a central bank representing the government. In the material order: this bank would be the depository of all wealth, of the entire funds of production, of all the instruments of work, in a word everything which today makes up the entire mass of individual property. The second-level banks would depend on this central bank and be only its extension, and the means for this central bank to keep in touch with the main regions, so as to be aware of their needs and production capacity; they would in turn command more and more specialised banks within their territory, each with a smaller area, and narrower ramifications of the tree of industry. All needs would converge on the upper banks; all efforts would stem from them; the general bank would only grant credit to towns; that is to say they would supply the instruments of work after having balanced and combined the different operations. Credit would then be shared out among the workers by the specialist banks representing the different branches of industry. (8) This raises a question which for us is very secondary, but is of great interest today, as it is only through this and for this that our statesmen attend to industry and appear to notice the existence of men who produce the wealth they consume, namely taxes, or what is more generally called the budget, as this includes taxes for revenue and its application as expenditure. In the industrial organisation system we have presented above, the assets of the budget are the total annual revenue of industry; and its liabilities are the distribution of this revenue to the secondary banks, each of which sets its own budget in the same way. In this system, what we would more aptly call taxes with regard to the class which directly produces wealth, that it to say with regard to industry, would be the part of this revenue which would be devoted to keeping the two other large classes of society, that is to say providing for the physical needs of men whose role is to develop the intelligence and feelings of all, but for the moment we are particularly interested in the specific budget for industry. Each man being paid according to his function, what today is called income, would no longer be a salary or a pension. An industrialist is no more the owner of a workshop, the workers and the instruments than a colonel owns a barracks, soldiers and arms; and yet all work hard for the man who produces so that he can enjoy glory, can have honour and prestige, just as well as the one who destroys. Let us digress for a moment. The industrial organisation which we have briefly described brings together, but on a large scale, all the advantages of guilds, leaders and deputies and all the legislative measures by which governments have until now tried to regulate industry; it has none of their drawbacks.
