"The principle now in practice is to induce a large portion of society to devote their lives to distribute wealth upon a large, a medium, and a small scale, and to have it conveyed from place to place in larger or smaller quantities, to meet the means and wants of various divisions of society and individuals, as they are now situated in cities, towns, villages, and country places. This principle of distribution makes a class in society whose business is to buy from some parties and to sell to others. By this proceeding they are placed under circumstances which [57]induce them to endeavor to buy at what appears at the time a low price in the market, and to sell again at the greatest permanent profit which they can obtain. Their real object being to get as much profit as gain between the seller to, and the buyer from them, as can be effected in their transactions.

"This feudalism," says M. Consid茅rant, "would be constituted as soon as the largest part of the industrial and territorial property of the nation belongs to a minority which absorbs all its revenues, while the great majority, chained to the work-bench or laboring on the soil, must be content to gnaw the pittance which is cast to them."[8]

"And in all this, in order to avoid dwelling on truths which have become commonplaces, and sound declamatory from their very truth, we have said nothing of the frightful moral corruption which industry, organized, or more properly speaking, disorganized, as it is at the present day, has introduced among the middle classes. Everything has become venal, and competition invades even the domain of thought.

"The arrangement is altogether a most improvident one for society, whose interest it is to produce the greatest amount of wealth of the best qualities; while the existing system of distribution is not only to withdraw great numbers from producing to become distributers, but to add to the cost of the consumer all the expense of a most wasteful and extravagant distribution; the distribution costing to the consumer many times the price of the original cost of the wealth purchased.

To a similar effect Owen, in the Book of the New Moral World, part 2, chap. iii.