Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/276

262 that time picture the manufactory of the future in a very different light from that which it may have in a society of proletarians carrying on industry in a technically progressive and inventive way; they suppose that it might resemble drawing-rooms in which ladies meet to do embroidery; in this way they gave a middle-class setting to the mechanism of production. Finally, they credited the proletariat with feelings closely resembling those which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers attributed to savages—goodness, simplicity, and an anxiety to imitate a superior race of men. With such hypotheses it was an easy matter to conceive an organisation of peace and happiness; it was only necessary to make the rich better and the poorer class more enlightened. These two operations seemed easily realisable, and then the fusion of the drawing-room and the factory, which has turned the heads of so many Utopists, would be brought about. The "new school" never conceives things on an idyllic, Christian, and middle-class model; it knows that the process of production requires entirely different qualities from those met with in the upper classes; it is only on account of the moral qualities, which are necessary to improve production, that it deals so much with ethical questions. The new school, then, resembles the economists much more than the Utopists; like G. de Molinari, it considers that the moral progress of the proletariat is as necessary as material improvement in machinery, if modern industry is to be lifted to the increasingly higher levels that technical science allows it to attain; but it descends farther than this author does into the depths of this problem, and does not content itself with vague recommendations about religious duty. In its insatiable