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  constituted ­
  organisms  will  at  last  prevail.  Let  instruction  be  given
to  the  working  man,  and  every  possible  facility  for  forming  productive ­
  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  succumbs ­
  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  in