9 8 



It is necessary and there is no other 

 solution that the machines should become 

 collective or social property. Then, evidently, 

 they will have no other effect than to diminish 

 the sum total of work and of muscular effort 

 necessary to produce a given quantity of 

 products. And thus each workman will see 

 his daily portion of work diminish, and his 

 existence will continually and increasingly 

 rise to one worthy of a human creature. 



This effect is already partially established 

 when, for example, several small landowners 

 found co-operative societies for the purchase 

 of machines for thrashing corn. If workmen 

 or peasants came to join the small landowners 

 in a great brotherly co-operation (and this will 

 only be possible when the land shall have 

 become social property), and if the machines 

 were municipal property, for example, like 

 the fire engines, and if the community let 

 them be used for field work, the machines 

 would not have an unhappy repelling effect, 

 and all men would see in them deliverers. 



It is thus that socialism, because it repre- 

 sents a higher phase of human evolution 

 would only eliminate from the present phase 

 the evil products of our unbridled economic 

 individualism, which creates on the one side 

 millionaires or those contractors who enrich 

 themselves in a few years by possessing them- 

 selves, according to forms more or less fore- 

 seen by the penal code, of public funds, and 

 which on the other side accumulates enormous 

 masses of miserable men in the lowest parts 

 of the great cities or in the houses of straw 



