THE FALL. 
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the right of making it, whoever has inherited from his authors only 
talents and virtue. They call that equality of rights. Myself, a 
citizen of France, classic country of liberty, I may think evil of 
that capital which gives to the son of the felon grocer the right to 
consume without producing, and to command the labor of others. 
I may find this right exorbitant, tyrannical, but shall I dare to say 
so ? Happily, if I consider capital and inheritance as tyrannical 
privileges, I consider them at the same time as necessary evils, as 
inevitable obstructions strewn by fate upon the road of progress. 
Oh no, please God, and also the attorney-general (^procureur du 
roi), I do not share the blind hatred which noble spirits of this 
time have vowed against capital. Capital is neither more odious 
nor dearer to me than civilization or barbarism. Call it a para- 
sitical excrescence, a poisonous fungus, I care little. 
This parasitical excrescence only germinates on misery ; there is 
the fact ; it is an effect and not a cause ; make the cause cease, the 
effect will disappear. 
What is urgent is not to rave against the disease of capital, but 
to try to cure it. Now if this capital, so much accursed, this pu- 
tative father of the proletariate and of moneyed feudalism, had only 
inspired us by its tyranny with the desire of doing without its 
services, we should owe it gratitude and pardon for this desire 
alone. 
The planet suffered horribly by these intestine discords, by the 
outrageous pretensions of force and of capital ! pain gradually sap- 
ped her health, and the ravages of disease followed upon its sur- 
face a march parallel to that of the ravages of war. She contin- 
ued her work of creation with courage, but strength already failed 
for the perfection of her human races, which we easily recognize 
at the present day by the facial characters of the last created races 
(Australian), who too much resemble the quadrumana. And the 
sad hiatus, daughter of impotence and mother of chaos, began to 
dishonor the Series. 
The decline declared itself toward the third century of the para- 
disaical era. At the end of three more centuries, the virus of the 
moralist doctrines, which preach compression to consolidate the 
rule of capital and of injustice, was already infiltrated in the veins 
