ystem of property, or a compact between several
systems of property. There is the foundation of all its art, the
exercise of which demands that the state itself became an economic
power, and that it also dispose of means and processes to make property
pass from the hands of some into the hands of others. When, by the
effect of an acute and violent change of the forms of production, it is
necessary to resort to an unusual and extraordinary readjustment of the
relations of property (for example, the abolition of mortmain and fiefs,
the abolition of commercial monopolies), then the old political form is
insufficient and revolution is necessary to create a new organ which may
operate the new economic transformation.

If we make an exception of the very ancient times which are unknown to
us, all history is developed in the contacts and the antagonisms of the
different tribes and communities, and thereafter of the different
nations and different states; that is to say, that the reasons for the
internal antitheses in the circle of each society are always more and
more complicated with frictions with the outside world. These two
reasons for antagonism condition each other reciprocally, but in ways
which are always varying. Often it is internal disturbance which urges a
community or a city to enter into external collisions; at other times it
is these collisions which alter the internal relations.

The principal motive for the different relations between the different
communities has been from the beginnings, even as it is to-day,
_commerce_ in the broad sense of the word, that is to say, exchange,
whether it is a matter of giving up, as in the poor tribes, merely the
surplus in exchange for other things, or whether it is a matter, as
to-day, of production on a large scale, which is carried on with the
exclusive intention of selling so as to draw from a sum of money a
larger sum of money. This enormous mass of events exterior and
interior, which accumulate and pile upon each other in history, is such
a trouble to the historians who content themselves with exploring it and
summarizing it, that they become lost in the infinite attempts at
chronological groups and bird's-eye views. Whoever, on the contrary,
knows the internal development of the different social types in their
economic structure, and who considers political events as the particular
results of the forces acting in society, ends by triumphing over the
confusion born