ladder," said M. Louis Strauss recently, the distinguished president of the Belgian Conseil Supérieur du Commerce et de l'Industrie. By reason of this ignorance a number of grown-up children, who fancy themselves to be mature citizens, believe that the State can fix wages and the hours of labour, turn the employer out of his undertaking and replace him by inspectors, and secure markets for commodities, while raising their net cost according to the whims of parliamentary majorities. In this book I have set forth economic facts which everyone is in a position to verify for himself. It is a manual for the use of all who are desirous of calling themselves familiar with the question, including Socialists who hold hold opinions in good faith. September, 1909. their YVES GUYOT. CHAPTER I PLATO'S ROMANCE Politico-economic romances---Common features-Government by the wisest: abolition of private interest-Castes-Plato and the warrior caste-Conception realised by the Mamelukes in Egypt-Police-Xenophon Plotinus Monasteries, their principles: separation of the sexes, contributions of the faithful. VON KIRCHENHEIM, in his book "Die ewige Utopie," has traced the history of politicoeconomic romances after Sudre, Reybaud, Moll and others. These works all present a family likeness and are founded on the ancient conception of a golden age, an Eden, an ideal existing in a far distant past-a conception which survives in such writers as Karl Marx, Engels and Paul Lafargue, who would have all the ills of humanity date from the moment when the communism of primitive societies came to an end. All these conceptions seek to confer the governing power upon the wisest: Plato gives it to the philosophers, and the same idea reappears in Auguste Comte. They are all founded upon the suppression of private interest as the motive of human actions, and the substitution of altruism (to use the word coined by Auguste Comte), to attain which their authors abolish private property, and those among them who are logical set up the community of women. Plato Nearly all these writers constitute castes. proclaims the necessity of slavery and declares that the occupations of a shoemaker and a blacksmith degrade those who follow them. Labourers, artisans, and traders form a caste whose duty it is to produce for warriors and philosophers and to obey them. In the "Republic" the caste of warriors only possesses property collectively, the abolition of private property being in Plato's opinion the best means of preventing the abuse of power. The |