r the collectivist
regime. When once the industries ministering to purely _personal_ luxury
shall be suppressed--luxury which in most cases insults and aggravates
the misery of the masses--the quantity and variety of work will adapt
themselves gradually, that is to say naturally, to the socialist phase
of civilization just as they now conform to the bourgeois phase.

Moreover, under the socialist regime, every one will have the fullest
liberty to declare and make manifest his personal aptitudes, and it will
not happen, as it does to-day, that many peasants, sons of the people
and of the lower middle class, gifted with natural talents, will be
compelled to allow their talents to atrophy while they toil as peasants,
workingmen or employees, when they would be able to furnish society a
different and more fruitful kind of labor, because it would be more in
Harmony with their peculiar genius.

The one essential point is this: In exchange for the labor that they
furnish to society, society must guarantee to the peasant and the
artisan, as well as to the one who devotes himself to the liberal
careers, conditions of existence worthy of a human being. Then we will
no longer be affronted by the spectacle of a ballet girl, for instance,
earning as much in one evening by whirling on her toes as a scientist, a
doctor, a lawyer, etc., in a year's work. In fact to-day the latter are
in luck if they do that well.

Certainly, the arts will not be neglected under the socialist regime,
because socialism wishes life to be agreeable for all, instead of for a
privileged few only, as it is to-day; it will, on the contrary, give to
all the arts a marvelous impulse, and if it abolishes private luxury
this will be all the more favorable to the splendor of the public
edifices.

More attention will be paid to assuring to each one remuneration in
proportion to the labor performed. This ratio will be ascertained by
taking the difficulty and danger of the labor into account and allowing
them to reduce the time required for a given compensation. If a peasant
in the open air can work seven or eight hours a day, a miner ought not
to work more than three or four hours. And, indeed, when everybody shall
work, when much unproductive labor shall be suppressed, the aggregate of
daily labor to be distributed among men will be much less heavy and more
easily endured (by reason of the more abundant food, more comfortable
lodging and recreation guaranteed to