emselves to be the directing power of social life. The great
industrial revolution which was produced made it clear that social
classes, if they are not a fact of nature, are still less a consequence
of chance and of free will; they arise historically and socially in a
determined form of production. And who, in truth, has not seen the birth
under his eyes of new proletarians upon the economic ruin of so many
classes of small proprietors, small peasants and artisans; and who has
not been in a position to discover the method of this new creation of a
new social status, to which so many men were reduced and in which they
were necessarily obliged to live. Who has not been in a position to
discover that money, transformed into capital, had succeeded, in a few
years, in becoming master by the attraction which it exercises over the
labor of free men, in whom the necessity of selling themselves freely as
wage workers had been prepared long before by so many ingenious legal
processes and by violent or indirect expropriation? And who has not seen
the new cities rise around factories and create around their
circumference this desolating poverty, which is no longer the effect of
individual misfortune, but the condition and the source of wealth? And
in this new poverty were numerous women and children, arising for the
first time from an unknown existence to take their place on the page of
history as a sinister illustration of a society of equals. And who did
not feel--even if that had not been announced in the so-called doctrine
of the Rev. Malthus--that the number of guests which this mode of
economic organization can entertain, if it is sometimes insufficient for
him who, by reason of the favorable state of production, has need of
hands, is often also superabundant, and therefore finds no occupation
and becomes a source of danger? It becomes evident, also, that the rapid
and violent economic transformation which was accomplished openly in
England had succeeded there, because that country had been able to build
up for itself, as compared with the rest of Europe, a monopoly till then
unknown, and because to maintain this monopoly an unscrupulous policy
had been rendered necessary, and that permitted all, for one happy
moment, to translate into prose the ideological myth of the state, which
was to be the guardian and the preceptor of the people.

This immediate perception of these consequences of the new life was the
origin of the pes