Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/129

 THE PKOPHET OF SAN PEANCISCO. 11

minds have done so. The mind of Voltaire was certainly not disposed to accept without question any of the beliefs that underlay the rotten political system which he saw and hated. He was one of those who assailed it with every weapon, and who ultimately overthrew it. Among his fellows in that work there was a perfect revelry of rebel- lion and of unbelief. In the grotesque procession of new opinions which had begun to pass across the stage while he was still upon it, this particular opinion against prop- erty in land had been advocated by the famous "Jean Jacques." Voltaire turned his powerful glance upon it, and this is how he treated it :*

��B. Avez-vous oublie" que Jean-Jacques, un des peres de Moderne, a dit, que le premier qui osa clore et cultiver un terrain fut Fennemi du genre humain, qu'il fallait 1'exterminer, et que les fruits sont a tous, et que la terre n'est a personnel N'avons-nous pas deja examine" ensemble cette belle proposition si utile a la So- cie'te'?

A. Quel est ce Jean-Jacques? II faut que ce soit quelque Hun, bel esprit, qui ait 6crit cette impertinence abominable, ou quelque mauvais plaisant, "buffo magro, qui ait voulu rire de ce que le monde entier a de plus se"rieux. . ..

For my own part, however, I confess that the mocking spirit of Voltaire is not the spirit in which I am ever tempted to look at the fallacies of Communism. Apart altogether from the appeal which was made to me by this author, I have always felt the high interest which belongs to those fallacies, because of the protean forms in which they tend to revive and reappear, and because of the call they make upon us from time to time to examine and identify the fundamental facts which do really govern the condition of mankind. Never, perhaps, have commu- nistic theories assumed a form more curious, or lent


 * Dictionnaire PMlosopMque, 1764, art. "Loi Naturelle."

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