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 “ méthode de réduction & l’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 
