d the distribution thereof--and
annihilates them; or it annihilates the natural equilibrium of
production and consumption; it causes the labourer to be deceived in
the amount of his reward, and it causes progress in prosperity to be
changed into a continual progress in poverty. Finally, it inverts all
ideas of justice in commerce.

The State, in its economic relations, should, according to Proudhon,
eventuate in an equalisation between the patricians and the
proletariat; its regulations (such as taxation) should, in the first
place, be an antidote against the arrogance and excessive power of
monopoly; but even the institution of the State fails in its purpose,
since taxes, instead of being paid by those who have wealth, are
almost exclusively paid by those who have not; the army, justice,
peace, education, hospitals, workhouses, public offices, even
religion,--in short, everything which is intended for the advance,
emancipation, and the relief of the proletariat being first paid for
and supported by the proletariat, and then either turned against it or
lost to it altogether.

It would be useless to repeat what Proudhon says about the beneficial,
and at the same time fateful, consequences both of free-trade and its
opposite. Who does not know the arguments which even to-day are used
by politicians and savants in the still undecided controversy for and
against it?

In this system of contradiction, then, in this antithesis of society,
Proudhon believed he had discovered the law of social progress, while
as a matter of fact he had only given a very negative proof (though he
certainly would hardly have acknowledged it) that there is not in
economics any more than in ethics anything absolute, and that
"benefit" and "harm" are relative terms which have nothing in common
with the essence of things; and it is just as wrong in the one case to
regard the existing social order as the best of all possible worlds,
as it is in the other to regard any one economic institution as a
social panacea, or to blame one or the other for all the evils of an
evil world. Such a confession of faith might easily be considered
trivial, and it might even give rise to a supercilious smile if it
required nothing less than the doctrine of antithesis taught by Kant
and Hegel to be brought in to prove what are obviously matters of
fact. But perhaps it is just this superficial smile which is the
justification of Proudhon, who had to fight a severe and