they prevail
over the clear dictates of the conscience that thunder in our ears that
it is murderous to grind the life out of the poor in the name of an
economical fetish? Is not the man more than the meat, and the body
more than the raiment? How shall not man, then, be better than many
economical laws? If the laws outrage our sense of justice, then are
they false laws, because false to reason, and they must be abolished.
The unrestricted domination of the competition theory which urges men
to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, and pay the very
lowest wages that poor outcasts are forced in their destitution to
accept--is that to be the permanent condition of large masses of
toilers in the towns of the richest country in the world? Is the
matchbox-maker to go on for ever turning out a gross for 2 1/4d.,
providing her own paste and string? Are wretched women to toil from
morning till night folding sheets--sheets of cheap bibles at 10s. a
week and pay lodging and keep a family out of it? Are men and women to
be decimated by consumption in the poisoned atmosphere of some of our
factories? No commonwealth can exist on such a basis, and if
economical laws are invoked in its support, those laws are an infamy.
No wonder Carlyle fiercely denounced it all as "a wretched,
unsympathetic, scraggy atheism and egoism".

Well, Auguste Comte had witnessed all this and possibly worse than this
in Prance. He knew the institutions of his country and of his age, and
he came to the deliberate conclusion that if any progress was to be
made, if this degrading egoism was to be put down, this callous
insensibility on the part of employers towards the labourers, whose
slow martyrdom produces the wealth they enjoy, the whole scheme of
social philosophy would have to be reconsidered and a new foundation
provided whereon to build the commonwealth. "You want altruism in
place of egoism; sympathy instead of selfishness," he preached. "How
are you going to obtain it? For eighteen centuries now you have been
walking in one beaten path, following one and the same light, listening
to the same spiritual guides. What have they taught you? Whither have
they led you? To the impasse which you have now reached. Has not the
time come to begin anew; to reconstruct, to reorganise society? And
this time it must be _sans dieu, sans roi, par le culte systematique de
l'Humanite_."

Such is the remedy proposed by Auguste Comte for