, etc.
But social economy is not confined to this narrow circle. Fourierism,
Saint-Simonism, communism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false
philanthropy, affected aspirations to equality and chimerical
fraternity, questions relative to luxury, to salaries, to machines, to
the pretended tyranny of capital, to distant territorial acquisitions,
to outlets, to conquests, to population, to association, to
emigration, to imposts, to loans, have encumbered the field of science
with a host of parasitical _sophisms_, which demand the hoe and the
sickle of the diligent economist. It is not because we do not
recognize the fault of this plan, or rather of this absence of plan.
To attack, one by one, so many incoherent sophisms which sometimes
clash, although more frequently one runs into the other, is to condemn
one's self to a disorderly, capricious struggle, and to expose one's
self to perpetual repetitions.
How much we should prefer to say simply how things are, without
occupying ourselves with the thousand aspects in which the ignorant
see them! To explain the laws under which societies prosper or decay,
is virtually to destroy all sophistry at once.
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