tue rise and fall of tile international. 171 
pensable. How are they to be preserved among equals? 
To-day the employer expels the workman who does not work : 
this is the stimulus. In the new social organization expulsion 
can hardly be included ; must recourse, then, be had to the 
prison ? At present the proprietor is interested in preserving 
his capital and in improving his apparatus. The co-operative 
members will be much less interested, since they will be only 
usufructuaries, and the responsibility for deteriorations will fall 
on society in general. At bottom the economic problem is 
nothing but the organization of responsibility and of justice. 
The Collectivists are ready to swear by Darwin : they ought, 
then, to admit that, in the struggle for existence, the best con 
stituted organisms will at last prevail. Let instruction be given 
to the working man, and every possible facility for forming pro 
ductive societies: when they shall thus have “fair play " if 
Collectivism is worth more than Individualism, their associations 
will supplant private enterprises, and the new régime will be 
established by a gradual and slow evolution, just as all economic 
transformations are made. If, on the contrary, their principle 
IS inferior in respect of the stimulus to activity of labour, to the 
formation of capital, and to industrial progress, even should 
they succeed in establishing it by a forcible revolution, it would 
not last : it would disappear, as every inferior organism suc 
cumbs when placed in contact with a superior organism 
The Communists demand the abolition of hereditary suc- 
; it already been tried. In 
the Middle Ages there was no succession in the case of the 
serfs in mortmain. In order to defeat the claims of the 
superior lord, they formed themselves into corporations. These 
c^^,emtives^^:ri^, p^^^al d^l 
tinned in possession without interruption, and thus there was 
the collective property of groups in which deaths never cause 
a succession. Is not this the ideal that certain Collectivists 
" *'>« it has vanished at the touch 
ttviliaation, and that it is even now disappearing inNo full text available for this image