REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM. 409 



serve, say they, more employment for the working classes. 

 Let us, for a moment, take up this position, and the 

 anathema will be found to extend far beyond machines 

 properly so called. 



From the beginning we shall be led, for example, to 

 tax our ancestors with great improvidence. If instead 

 of founding, if instead of persevering in extending the 

 city of Paris on the two banks of the Seine, they had 

 established it in the middle of the plain of Villejuif, for 

 centuries back the water-carriers would have formed the 

 most occupied, the most numerous, the most important 

 portion of the population. Well, Messrs. Economists, 

 set to work in favour of the water-carriers. To make 

 the Seine deviate from its course is not an impossibility ; 

 propose this undertaking ; open a subscription immedi- 

 ately to leave Paris dry, and the general laugh will show 

 you that the mode of reducing to absurdity * has some 

 good in it, even in political economy ; and in their plain, 

 sense, the workmen themselves will tell you that the 



/ 



river has created the immense capital in which such re- 

 sources are found ; and that, without it, Paris would per- 

 haps still be a Villejuif. 



Good Parisians had hitherto congratulated themselves 

 on the vicinity of those inexhaustible quarries where suc- 

 cessive generations go to dig out materials for the con- 

 struction of their temples, their palaces, their private 

 dwellings. A mere illusion ! The new political economy 

 will prove to you that it would have been eminently 

 advantageous if the plaster, the freestone, and rubble had 



* This " me"thode de reduction a 1'absurde " is the reductio ad ab- 

 surdum, or arguing ex absurdo, of logicians and mathematicians; in 

 which the truth of a proposition is proved by showing that the con- 

 trary is unreasonable. Translator. 



SEC, SER. 18 



