Civil Service.

in addition to a special constabulary, an administrative service, Police and with its members exclusively devoted to their duties. Herein we have the two great sources of public expenditure. The annual total for the two combined, taking the former numbers as the basis of an estimate, would, it seems to me, reach the sum of twenty millions of francs in each of the sociocratic states, as already determined. This sum will ordinarily be increased by a half in consequence of the regular institution of a system of public works, calculated to meet the evils arising from interruptions of private undertakings, and so to obviate or remedy the tendency in trades' unions to imperil industrial action. On this estimate the annual expenses of each republic will amount to thirty millions of francs, to be paid by the patriciate, £1,200,000. allowing it the compensation it may derive from including this insignificant item in the accounts on which the rate of prices will depend.

The only point on which the sociocratic budget is now defective is the determination of the sum of the Sacerdotal income, long derived from voluntary subscriptions, as I shall explain when treating of the transition, but finally requiring an official organisation. Adopting the numbers given in the opening of the chapter, I fix this annual payment at three hundred millions of francs for the whole West, or fifteen francs for each sacerdotal household; this includes all the expenses of the two thousand temples, each with a normal congregation of seventy thousand. The result is, the addition of a sixth to the national budget, reckoning, however, in this amount the sum transmitted to the central budget of the priesthood of Humanity to meet such expenses as have a general and not a local object.

Anyone, with these data, can sum up the whole cost of nutrition which the normal patriciate has habitually to provide, by constituting it a first charge on the produce of labour when organised on a systematic plan. The temple with its ten philosophers meets the wants of ten thousand families; it represents one banker, fifty merchants, a hundred manufacturers, and two hundred agriculturists. Thus the interpreters of the Great Being are the thousandth, its ministers the thirtieth, part of its agents. The weekly and monthly expenses of the maintenance of these agents, then, with a very slight exception, constitute nearly the whole of the outlay which the patriciate has to control by a constant superintendence, both as indi

(ii) Spiritual

government.

The Sacer

dotal sub

sidy.

£12,000,000.

The total nutrition to the Patri

expenses of

be met by

ciate.

The chief function of the banker.

The part of the Proletarate in civic life.

viduals and as a government. It is able, then, to estimate the amount of increase in the annual production necessary, if the generation it directs is duly to transmit to its successor the aggregate capital it received from its predecessor, with the anticipated augmentation. The result will be the formation of a true system of statistics (the statistics of the present day are empirical and unreliable) affording a reliable view of man's industrial progress, by aid of the accounts annually published by each of the five hundred dictatorships. Their publication will at once afford the means of judging whether the expenditure of the patricians does or does not interfere with the right discharge of their functions as regards the present and the future; such judgment constituting the sole financial check on the worthy ministers of Humanity within the competence of the priesthood and the public.

We thus see how the subordination of action to nutrition is more complete in the collective than in the individual organism; the end in view becoming external, altruism supplants egoism in the direction, and forms a more perfect and less unstable unity. The view here taken sets in its true light the normal dignity of the supreme patriciate, alone competent to conceive human industry in its entirety, by the light of the theory furnished by the religion, and under the impulse of synthesis derived from the priesthood. Under these conditions, the chief function of the banker is to organise with wisdom such undertakings as deserve assistance, whilst aiding in the suppression of the less sound. Besides the money derived from the circulation of values, he will dispose of the capital placed at his command by retired patricians, and perhaps even by the savings of plebeians, in both cases freely offered in aid of his financial operations, from the wish to avoid the trouble and anxiety attendant on inadequate means. It is in my eyes a happy omen for the proximate advent of Positivism that my first hints on the function of the banker have already led to an adequate conception of that function in its full extent on the part of a young banker, whose adhesion to the true religion is as prudent as it is devoted.

I have now, as the last step required to end the delineation of civic existence, to systematise its indispensable complement, the complement, at once moral and political, which it finds in the proletariate, the sole decisive guarantee of its coherence and its dignity.

situation of

riate

Granting the sociocratic conception of wages to remain in Favourable full force, the working classes, shielded as they are from liability the Proletato want, are in a better position than their temporal chiefs, nay morally. even than their spiritual, for realising the grand object of the common education. Their situation is the one in which a man can best attend to his improvement and to his happiness, by a wise exercise of all the faculties which are worth cultivating, whilst he links his domestic to his citizen life through the instrumentality of the form of action most consonant to our nature. In the proletariate, more than elsewhere, is the subordination of egoism to altruism on a right footing, as circumstances there favour the repression of the former, the growth of the latter. The happy mean ought there to render easy the discipline of the nutritive instinct, and the plenitude of domestic bliss victory over the sexual. Pride and vanity, these are the instincts which the people must most exert its wisdom to check, for they can find there no social destination as in the exceptional instances above given, and so tend usually to be a source of trouble both privately and publicly. Looking on them as human infirmities, the proletary will exert himself so to shape them and limit them that they may act simply as a healthy stimulus to emulation in the discharge of his daily duties, whether as a workman or as a man. If a real vocation leads him to aspire to a share in government, either spiritual or temporal, he is aware that its necessary concentration in few hands places it out of the reach of most of those who might have a claim; he bends himself to the putting forth of his own proper value in such a degree as to deserve the only recompense accessible to all.

Unlike his chiefs, the proletary is not absorbed by his special business; as much as they, however, must he consider its right performance as the first duty of the true citizen. To feel its nobleness, he has but to consider that a concerted interruption of work would soon derange the whole economy of society. But, whilst such a cessation of action by the collective proletariate must always be open to it, in order to ensure a proper respect for its free cooperation, the proletariate will reserve this formidable power as a last resource, to meet serious and protracted violations of the sociocratic arrangements. Its possibility is destined mainly to obviate the having recourse to violence, such a step being intrinsically inconsistent with

The great Proletariate rather than

power of the

to be felt

put out.

General office of the

industrial life, and yet at all times imminent, as the people has a natural propensity to surmount social difficulties by an abuse of the power of number. As a result of the whole education and regime, the peculiar power of the proletariate will be generally felt without being called into exercise. For not to dwell on the systematic remonstrances of the priesthood, the patricians will of themselves be aware that they are not the direct agents in reproducing wealth, and that, however large their capital from all sources, they would be powerless if the plebeians did not turn this instrument to account. Far from encouraging pride in the people, their sense of this truth habitually reacts with a sympathetic influence, as it tends to lead the proletaries to a juster estimate of their continuous service on behalf of posterity in the aggregate, the only legitimate object of all their labours of whatever kind.

Although it is incumbent on the proletariate to overcome Proletariate. its inherent tendency to neglect its special work and attend to its general function, it is still this general function which determines its character as a social element, by the contrast between the homogeneity of the plebeian and the heterogeneity of the patrician body. If the citizen is to pay, as he should pay, constant attention to the welfare of the whole, it can only be on the condition that his peculiar business do not habitually absorb him, but involve simply an easy responsibility. In the priesthood even, where the two coincide, the general function takes a special character, and so tends to interfere with the supervision of the whole by making the priesthood attach undue importance to the systematisation of abstract science. The exercise of this supervision then, a normal want, devolves on the proletariate, disengaged as it is from all prepossessions and naturally drawn towards an office involving no responsibility, and rendered easy by the limited area of the sociocratic States. Whilst listening with respect to the advice of the priesthood in regard to it, the plebeians should discharge it with complete independence, so to be able, if occasions arise, to wield it against the encroachments of the spiritual power no less than the abuses of the practical power, invoking against both the faith which all alike acknowledge.

The Salons of the People.

The salons of the people, then, become the principal laboratories of public opinion not merely as the more numerous, but above all as more apt to check an authority not derived from

the people, but the misuse of which falls principally on the people. The primary condition of the right discharge of this function of control is the homogeneity of the proletariate, the way for which has been prepared by the dissolution, in the natural course of things, of all the trade associations, associations only suited to the Middle Ages. Such homogeneity, however, of the proletariate will be no obstacle to the rise of a class of workmen whose special work brings them into relation with all the others, a class therefore holding to the proletariate a position analogous to that which the bankers hold to the other capitalists.

and Engi

Since the total abolition of slavery, the use of machinery Machinery has gradually allowed us to draw from the inorganic world neers. the material forces which human beings no longer furnished. Machinery, as the general complement of the industrial organisation, grew in importance everywhere during the latest phase of the Western revolution, coincidently with the rise of the banking class, prior to which event industrial undertakings were limited in extent and deficient in permanence. In the normal state and under systematic direction, machinery is to the arts what methods are to the sciences; neither directly produces, but both become the great means of production. Of universal application, the construction of machines leads to the creation of a distinct branch of industry, in natural connection with all other branches, not merely of manufacture, but of commerce, nay even of agriculture. Banking alone is independent of it, but the character of generality which attaches to both alike should form a bond between the highest directors and the highest operatives, once let the haughtiness of the patrician and the pride of the plebeian give way to the better feelings of the normal state.

The existence and the fraternal ascendancy of this class, a Mendicants. class composed of the highest and least special working men, constitute a natural preservative of the homogeneity of the proletariate, the condition of its convergent action, and an obstacle to the dissolving tendency of scattered effort. But the free acceptance of its supremacy, the sole hierarchical element admissible in the popular milieu, requires to complete it at the other end of the scale, the incorporation, on suitable conditions, of an exceptional class, a class with regard to which Western feeling is as yet defective, especially in Protestant nations.