If a genus of fruit yielding a hundred varieties, contains thirty applicable to a certain district, its cultivators, that is to say, those only who will be passionately devoted to the care of this fruit, will be subdivided into a cabalistic series of thirty groups, each of them devoted to the care of one of the branches to which it will be partial. Each group will intrigue in favor of that which it has adopted, and against the two varieties contiguous to its own; each individual will intrigue in favor of the different groups in which he shall play his part; for, in a culture of pears or apples, an individual can very well take part in favor of four or five species, and enroll himself in the same number of groups in favor of which he cabals, and whereof he supports the culture by pecuniary or other means. It will be thus with all the industrial functions, and particularly with the domestic function, of which a fearful confusion is made in civilization, by charging one woman only, wife or servant, with the whole business. Yet these functions are of an immense variety. A poor housekeeper is thus obliged amongst us to have her hands full of these innumerable details; to take care of the kitchens, cellars, barns, stables, gardens, orchards, fruit-loft, confectionary, provisions, wash-house, serving, etc., and of the varieties of these different genera. In the garden alone a housekeeper may have fifty species to look after, and in the kitchen almost as many; in the cellar at least twenty; that is to say, the housekeeper is obliged to mind alone all the household labors that would require the intervention of more than three hundred groups in a phalanx of passional harmony. Accordingly the lady holds this household work in aversion, whereof the least branch is so much above her means, and presents no fuel for intrigue. Every woman would willingly join in three or four branches of these labors, if she found coupled with them cabalistic parties and other incentives; but being obliged to embrace the task of one hundred or two hundred corporations, she is exhausted, disheartened, and she cannot fail to have an aversion for domestic labors, or to perform them without intelligence, as happens with our housekeepers, the most renowned of whom are novices in comparison with the intelligence of the passional series, where every variety, every shade, employs a group violently empassioned, and consequently very intelligent,-for you only do well in industry what you do from passionate liking. Having sufficiently proved the existence of the passion, it only remains for us to distinguish its two developments,-the harmonic and the subversive. The harmonic cabalist is a productive, converging emulation,—a competition to rival in economy and in industrial perfection. The subversive cabalist is a destructive opposition, or contrivance to rival in ruin and depravation. Emulative-cabal binds all the series, slightly isolating itself from the extremes or transitious. Subversive-cabal binds extremes, kings and soldiers, to oppress masses by a fusion of extremes. The emulative cabal is easily distinguished from the subversive; the results on both sides must be productive and economical, in order that there may be emulation. Manufacturers contending about a price and perfecting their article to obtain it, are in emulative cabal, for the result will be useful to each of them, and economical, in as much as it is useful to the mass of society, by the improvement of industry. Merchants who contend in sales and lavish the costs of rivalry, multiply journeys for orders, sell below the cost price to carry off a buyer from their neighbor, are in subversive cabal. Their competition is mischievous; it is nothing but a connivance of idle expenses and of insane measures that will be ultimately fatal to each of them, by impoverishing them and impelling them to bankruptcy. This extravagant rivalry will in like manner be ruinous to society, by the useless consumption of capital, agents, journeys, and outlays which add nothing to the produce, and are a dead loss to society. This parallel of the manufacturer and of the merchant is the exact picture of the two cabalists, and of the two competitions, the converging and the diverg ing. The manufacturers tend collectively to economize, to simplify by machines that require fewer hands, shorten labor, and claim fewer agents from culture. The merchants, collectively, tend, without intending it, to complicate the mechanism, to over-load it with parasitical agents and useless outlays. Since '89 their number has tripled itself; their expenses, their journeys, correspondencies, and outlays to gain customers, are become three and four times as numerous, for a function which (in the end) is still of the same extent; since a town of 100,000 souls does not consume more provisions or clothing than it did thirty years ago, and yet the casting up of its mercantile agencies will give a number three times as great as that of 1789, and a three-fold employment of hands and of capital unprofitably diverted from productive labor, cultivation, and manufacture. There exists therefore two competitions, and consequently two cabalistic processes, whereof one brings about complication and ruin, the other economy and perfection. This twofold development is common to all the passions. For want of knowing the cabalist, which is nevertheless a very visible passion, our economists have missed the whole theory of reductive or truthful trade or competition, and have thrown themselves into the false theory;—that of compli cated, anarchial, and lying competition. A comical error of the savants is that of having thought that the merchants are constantly directed by Ambition, whereas they are very often moved by the subversive cabalist; accordingly they are seen to compromise their fortune in outlays of competition, of rivalry and stock-gambling. There is no longer Ambition where there is an evident and advised risk of loss, as in the act of a merchant who undersells to crush his neighbor, and ruins himself to ruin another. If the philosophers had known the tenth passion, the cabalist, which they so admirably practice, they would have made this distinction in commercial mechanism, and discovered that you must repress it, since it falls in all directions into the effects of the subversive cabalist: a lavishing of agents and of capital, loss of produce, etc. This jealous mania of the merchants is the antipode of the reductive competition, which ought to produce the greatest economy possible. How many other faults are committed in serial mechanism from having confounded Ambition with the Cabalist! Their difference is seen everywhere. Do'nt you see in every country litigious men, who from the love of carrying on intrigues in the law-courts, will start twenty suits against their neighbors, and will ruin themselves in pleading for the pleasure of making their rivals undergo costs? M. Selves who has written a work against law-suits, appears to be the most litigious man in France; and such are in general the individuals who have the cabalist among their dominants a passion that, almost always injurious in civilization, will be infinitely valuable in the mechanism of the series, where the mania for discord is the germ of classification, exact gradation, and active emulation between all the groups. The cabalistic spirit is only injurious amongst us from a deficiency of industrial aliment. Let us suppose four groups occupied in making a certain culture prevail, say four pears,-called bury-pears, the blonde, the grey, the brown, and the green (speckled bergamot.) If these four masses of cultivators carry on intrigue to give their fruit the upperhand, make outlays to improve it, and secure suffrages, or at least create a mass of partizans, by the excellence of each species, their cabals will have been laudable, and as useful as those of the elections are injurious and unproductive; and if these same men have each of them thirty cabals, like those of the bury-pear, there will only result from them prodigies of industry, a general phrenzy of emulation. People will be convinced that discord in industrial series is as useful as accord, that it is requisite that each of the groups of the series should be jealous of the two contiguous ones, and should cabal actively to carry off the palm from them and cause the preference to be given to their own produce. It will be found useful that the group of the white bury-pear should labor to take partizans from that of the green bury, and in the same way with the others, for from all these efforts there will result an extreme perfection of each produce. The cabals in this order of things, will become a passion as divine as it is now infernal, where its development only leads to injurious excesses, to the intrigues of stock-jobbers, to political commotions, etc. In reply to the detractors of the cabalist, you may prove by a parallel of Ambition and of Love, that the cabalistic spirit is only vicious where it has too little aliment, and that cabals heaped together in great numbers are a pledge of passional balance. In fact, Love is balanced in the case of a young man, handsome and very versatile, like Alcibiades; each of his love-intrigues is a subject of charm to him; he has always a greater share of success, at least three-fourths of triumph for onefourth of failures; you might even say nineteen-twentieths for one-twentieth. In this case his love affairs only occupy him slightly; he carries them on with the confidence of a soldier secure of victory; he is not absorbed by love, and can lead abreast with it other passions like that of interest or ambition, whereas a philosophical Cock-turtle-dove, entirely absorbed by his lady turtle-dove, will lose sight of a host of other matters that he ought to have combined with his amours. Such a benedict will have no elasticity in business; he would not know how to make Ambition and Love march abreast, like the man who conducts rapidly several love-intrigues, and who handles Love in accords of the fifth and sixth degrees. In a case of this nature, his cabals are not limited, they extend from shepherdesses to queens; they embrace the sum total of society, and combine the groups of Ambition and of Friendship, with those of Love of Familism or Marriage. The man who is able to combine in this way the cabals of the four groups is the man who is balanced in affective passions. He who neglects the three others for the sake of one of the four affectives, or the three other affective cabals for the love of country and of fraternity, is a fool who in time finds out his folly, and perceives that he ought to have led abreast the four cabals, and to have thought of interest at the same time that he thought of fraternity. You only arrive at this equilibrium by dint of having many cabals in each of the four affectives and of the five sensitives. The moment that one of the nine is confined to a single intrigue, it absorbs everything, and a character thus pre-occupied is nothing more than an abortion in civilized affairs. Social perfection consists, therefore, in giving a full development to the cabals in each of the nine passions, in order to balance the different sorts of cabals one by the other, instead of reducing them to the feeblest development, or that of the Barbarians, who, by the custom of the harem, are deprived of the cabal of gallantry on the side of the man, and become a tomb of love in his case, instead of being its throne. It is this privation of cabals that transforms Ambition into a gnawing worm to the civilizers; it is a stimulant to the courtiers who have a hundred intrigues to carry on; it is a torment for the small proprietor, who, with the delights of his rural and moral mediocrity, is maddened at not having influence in elections, nor the means of acquiring the field that would improve his estate, nor chances of marrying his poorly portioned daughter; he genuinely maddens to be without influence in the cabals, and confined in the paths of morality. He would require, to enjoy the passional balance, thirty cabals at least to carry on, and illusions to pursue; instead of this full and varied career, he has often, as the only aliment of the tenth passion, a single cabal, a longing for a public office which he loses after all. A PHASE OF LIFE. ENSE is the lower, yet at times It rules the soul with iron power, As weeds will sometimes choke the flower I felt the grasp, and wrestled hard In vain I raised the Eloi, But unavailing was the cry, The soul unstirred Lay powerless, till, each coil made fast, With many questionings I went My weary course. A dull dense cloud All black and strange.-And why, I said, And grant no aid? Clear shines the sun, and yet I go High, heaven-born yearnings I have had, Ah, why thus mourning do I go? A season came of change. I past To other scenes, I cared not where- My sleep was broken, visions came I longed for death, but could not die: M m Like green withes from me, and I stood, In all the strength of womanhood, Loosed from the spell. Old thoughts, old feelings passed away; And thought not of its ancient case, Tears flowed, but they were not of grief: The sunbeam on my page-the wall The winds-the foot falls on the street Were angel-voices low and sweet, I heard them all. |