fragments borrowed from the very system that socialism sneers
at,--plagiarisms, in a word, of political economy, outside of
which socialism is incapable of conceiving and formulating an
idea.

Every day sees the proofs in this grave suit accumulating, and
the question becoming confused.

While society has traveled and stumbled, suffered and thrived, in
pursuing the economic routine, the socialists, since Pythagoras,
Orpheus, and the unfathomable Hermes, have labored to establish
their dogma in opposition to political economy. A few attempts
at association in accordance with their views have even been made
here and there: but as yet these exceptional undertakings, lost
in the ocean of property, have been without result; and, as if
destiny had resolved to exhaust the economic hypothesis before
attacking the socialistic utopia, the reformatory party is
obliged to content itself with pocketing the sarcasms of its
adversaries while waiting for its own turn to come.

This, then, is the state of the cause: socialism incessantly
denounces the crimes of civilization, verifies daily the
powerlessness of political economy to satisfy the harmonic
attractions of man, and presents petition after petition;
political economy fills its brief with socialistic systems, all
of which, one after another, pass away and die, despised by
common sense. The persistence of evil nourishes the complaint of
the one, while the constant succession of reformatory checks
feeds the malicious irony of the other. When will judgment be
given? The tribunal is deserted; meanwhile, political economy