It is astonishing that the economists, with all their learning, have failed to perceive a fact so simple and so evident.
If they have perceived it, why have they neglected to condemn it?
HISTORICAL COMMENT .-- Much interest is felt at present in a financial operation which is expected to result in a reduction of the budget.
It is proposed to change the present rate of increase, five per cent.
Laying aside the politico-legal question to deal only with the financial question,--is it not true that, when five per cent.

is changed to four per cent., it will then be necessary, for the same reasons, to change four to three; then three to two, then two to one, and finally to sweep away increase altogether?
But that would be the advent of equality of conditions and the abolition of property.

Now it seems to me, that an intelligent nation should voluntarily meet an inevitable revolution half way, instead of suffering itself to be dragged after the car of inflexible necessity.
EIGHTH PROPOSITION.
Property is impossible, because its power of Accumulation is infinite, and is exercised only over finite quantities.
If men, living in equality, should grant to one of their number the exclusive right of property; and this sole proprietor should lend one hundred francs to the human race at compound interest, payable to his descendants twenty-four generations hence,--at the end of six hundred years this sum of one hundred francs, at five per cent., would amount to 107,854,010,777,600 francs; two thousand six hundred and ninety-six and one-third times the capital of France (supposing her capital to be 40,000,000,000), or more than twenty times the value of the terrestrial globe! Suppose that a man, in the reign of St.Louis, had borrowed one hundred francs, and had refused,--he and his heirs after him,--to return it.
Even though it were known that the said heirs were not the rightful possessors, and that prescription had been interrupted always at the right moment,--nevertheless, by our laws, the last heir would be obliged to return the one hundred francs with interest, and interest on the interest; which in all would amount, as we have seen, to nearly one hundred and eight thousand billions.
Every day, fortunes are growing in our midst much more rapidly than this.

The preceding example supposed the interest equal to one-twentieth of the capital,--it often equals one-tenth, one-fifth, one-half of the capital; and sometimes the capital itself.
The Fourierists--irreconcilable enemies of equality, whose partisans they regard as SHARKS--intend, by quadrupling production, to satisfy all the demands of capital, labor, and skill.

But, should production be multiplied by four, ten, or even one hundred, property would soon absorb, by its power of accumulation and the effects of its capitalization, both products and capital, and the land, and even the laborers.