be in few hands, because, as M. Comte observes, without great riches,
the obligations which society ought to impose, could not be fulfilled
without an amount of personal abnegation that it would be hopeless to
expect. If a person is conspicuously qualified for the conduct of an
industrial enterprise, but destitute of the fortune necessary for
undertaking it, M. Comte recommends that he should be enriched by
subscription, or, in cases of sufficient importance, by the State. Small
landed proprietors and capitalists, and the middle classes altogether,
he regards as a parasitic growth, destined to disappear, the best of the
body becoming large capitalists, and the remainder proletaires. Society
will consist only of rich and poor, and it will be the business of the
rich to make the best possible lot for the poor. The remuneration of the
labourers will continue, as at present, to be a matter of voluntary
arrangement between them and their employers, the last resort on either
side being refusal of co-operation, "refus de concours," in other words,
a strike or a lock-out; with the sacerdotal order for mediators in case
of need. But though wages are to be an affair of free contract, their
standard is not to be the competition of the market, but the application
of the products in equitable proportion between the wants of the
labourers and the wants and dignity of the employer. As it is one of M.
Comte's principles that a question cannot be usefully proposed without
an attempt at a solution, he gives his ideas from the beginning as to
what the normal income of a labouring family should be. They are on such
a scale, that until some great extension shall have taken place in the
scientific resources of mankind, it is no wonder he thinks it necessary
to limit as much as possible the number of those who are to be supported
by what is left of the produce. In the first place the labourer's
dwelling, which is to consist of seven rooms, is, with all that it
contains, to be his own property: it is the only landed property he is
allowed to possess, but every family should be the absolute owner of all