ent itself, but outside of that system, in the influence
of secondary conditions, the cause of their ruin, his experiments
are bound to burst like soap-bubbles against the modern system of
production.

The economic development of the allotment system has turned bottom
upward the relation of the farmer to the other classes of society.
Under Napoleon, the parceling out of the agricultural lands into small
allotments supplemented in the country the free competition and the
incipient large production of the cities. The farmer class was
the ubiquitous protest against the aristocracy of land, just then
overthrown. The roots that the system of small allotments cast into the
soil of France, deprived feudalism of all nutriment. Its boundary-posts
constituted the natural buttress of the bourgeoisie against every stroke
of the old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century, the
City Usurer stepped into the shoes of the Feudal Lord, the Mortgage
substituted the Feudal Duties formerly yielded by the soil, bourgeois
Capital took the place of the aristocracy of Landed Property. The former
allotments are now only a pretext that allows the capitalist class to
draw profit, interest and rent from agricultural lands, and to leave to
the farmer himself the task of seeing to it that he knock out his wages.
The mortgage indebtedness that burdens the soil of France imposes upon
the French farmer class they payment of an interest as great as the
annual interest on the whole British national debt. In this slavery of
capital, whither its development drives it irresistibly, the allotment
system has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes.
Sixteen million farmers (women and children included), house in hovels
most of which have only one opening, some two, and the few most favored
ones three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head.
The bourgeois social order, which, at the beginning of the century,
placed the State as a sentinel before the newly instituted allotment,
and that manured this with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out
its heart-blood and its very brain, and throws it into the alchemist's
pot of capital. The "Code Napoleon" is now but the codex of execution,
of sheriff's sales and of intensified taxation. To the four million
(children, etc., included) official paupers, vagabonds, criminals and
prostitutes, that France numbers, must be added five million souls who
hover over the p