Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/79

 whole of North America. And we have obtained instead of the proportional variety of product, the reign of cotton.

What now remains of this "relation of proportion." Nothing but the vow of an honest man, who would that the commodities should be produced in such proportions that they can be sold at an honest price. In all times the good bourgeois and the philanthropist economists have been pleased to make this innocent vow.

Let us hear old Bois-Guillebert: "The price of commodities," says he, "must always be proportioned, there being only this intelligence which can make them live together to constantly give and receive reciprocally (see the continual exchangeability of M. Proudhon) birth to one another. As wealth, then, is only this constant intercourse between man and man, between metier and metier, it is a fearful blindness to seek for the cause of poverty elsewhere than in the cessation of such commerce brought about by the derangement in the proportion of prices." ("Dissertations sur la Nature des Richesses.")

Listen also to a modern economist.

"A great law which must be applied to production, is the law of proportion, which can alone preserve the continuity of value. The equivalent must be guaranteed  All the nations have essayed at different epochs, by means of numerous commercial regulations and restrictions, to realise up to a certain point this law of proportion; but egoism, inherent in the nature of man, has forced him to overthrow all this regulation régime. A proportional production is the realisation of the entire truth of the science of social economy." (W. Atkinson, "Principles of Political Economy," London, 1840, pp. 170–195.)

Fuit Troja. This true proportion between supply and demand which again begins to become the object of so