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economic, political, legal, moral, artistic or 

 scientific on the most distant and most 

 indirect conditions of earthly life. 



The present organisation of private owner- 

 ship without any limit to family inheritance 

 and personal accumulation ; the continual 

 and always more complete application of 

 scientific discoveries to men's work in the 

 transformation of matter, the telegraph and 

 steam, the always extending migrations of 

 men cause the existence of a family of 

 peasants, of workmen, of small tradesmen, to 

 be united by invisible but tenacious threads 

 to the life of the world, and the crop of 

 coffee, of cotton, or of corn in the most 

 distant countries has its effect on all parts of 

 the civilised world, just as the decrease or 

 increase of solar spots forms a co- efficient of 

 periodical agricultural crises and directly 

 influences the lot of millions of men. 



This grand scientific conception of "the 

 unity of physical forces " according to the 

 expression of P. Secchi, or of universal 

 solidarity, throws far from it the childish 

 conception which makes free will and the 

 individual the cause of human phenomena. 



If a socialist proposed, even for a philan- 

 thropic object, to equip a factory for giving 

 work to the unemployed, and if he produced 

 articles abandoned by fashion and general 

 consumption, he would soon be brought to 

 bankruptcy by an inevitable consequence of 

 economic laws in spite of his philanthropic 

 intentions. 



Or if a socialist wished to give the work- 



