66
THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY.
locality, and, at the end of the year, the profits would be
distributed as a dividend.
Risk and the chances of loss would disappear, because
manufacture, instead of producing haphazard, would proceed
on a combined principle in response to known wants. What
a contrast there is to-day between the admirable order which
reigns in every factory, and the anarchy which desolates
the industrial world ! In each factory, the master sees that
nothing useless is made ; in order to make fifty four-wheeled
waggons only two hundred tires are prepared. But if it is a
question of supplying the general demand, which is unknown,
each manufacturer produces according to guess, and then tries
to sell his whole stock in competition with others. There
follow, of course, monetary and commercial crises from over
production, and thus equilibrium is restored. This is secured,
however, only at the cost of immense losses to the masters,
and of stoppages of work, yet more disastrous to the operatives.
These crises, this suffering, would be avoided if, the demand
being known, by means of statistics, the various associations
would come to a mutual understanding in order to meet it.
The activity of the various branches of production would be
regulated with as much precision as are the different kinds
of work in one of our present factories.
Already there are great metal foundries in which a whole
series of technical operations is performed, linked together into
one organic whole, which extracts the ore and the coal from
the ground, and turns out completely finished locomotives,
ships, and machines of all kinds. Krupp’s works in Germany,
those of Le Creusot in France, and of Seraing in Belgium are
examples of these admirable combinations, I his is the system
which should be extended to the whole community. Then
the productive capital and all the instruments of production
would belong permanently to the different societies grouped
in trade corporations. Newly invented methods of production
would become the property of the societies, private individuals,
as such, not having the working of them. On the other hand,
all articles of consumption, or their price, would be divided
among those who had contributed to produce them, exactly as
