following question:--

"To determine the general facts which govern the relations of
profits to wages, and to explain their respective oscillations."

A few years ago the same Academy asked, "What are the causes of
misery?" The nineteenth century has, in fact, but one
idea,--equality and reform. But the wind bloweth where it
listeth: many began to reflect upon the question, no one answered
it. The college of aruspices has, therefore, renewed its
question, but in more significant terms. It wishes to know
whether order prevails in the workshop; whether wages are
equitable; whether liberty and privilege compensate each other
justly; whether the idea of value, which controls all the facts
of exchange, is, in the forms in which the economists have
represented it, sufficiently exact; whether credit protects
labor; whether circulation is regular; whether the burdens of
society weigh equally on all, etc.

And, indeed, insufficiency of income being the immediate cause of
misery, it is fitting that we should know why, misfortune and
malevolence aside, the workingman's income is insufficient. It
is still the same question of inequality of fortunes, which has
made such a stir for a century past, and which, by a strange
fatality, continually reappears in academic programmes, as if
there lay the real difficulty of modern times.

Equality, then,--its principle, its means, its obstacles, its
theory, the motives of its postponement, the cause of social and
providential iniquities,--these the world has got to learn, in