man is poor and depressed, while a large portion of the non-workingmen ... are wealthy." The evil, according to Brownson, did not lie in an excess of government, as Adam Smith's disciples believed, but in the "present system of trade," specifically in wage labor—"a cunning device of the devil." The real enemy of the working class was the "middle class, always a firm champion of equality, when it concerns humbling a class above it; but ... its inveterate foe, when it concerns elevating a class below it." Having defeated the aristocracy, the middle class had turned "conservative, ... whether it call itself Whig or Radical." The "coming contest," already taking shape in England with the rise of the Chartist movement, would pit the working man against his employer, his "only real enemy." It would not be resolved "without war and bloodshed." Education would do little to improve the lot of the poor. Neither did the answer lie in "self-culture"—the favorite remedy of those who sought reform "without disturbing the social arrangements which render reform necessary." Since the evil was "inherent in all our social arrangements," it could not be cured "without a radical change of those arrangements."

The cure Brownson had in mind, of course, was proprietorship, not communism.

There must be no class of our fellow men doomed to toil through life as mere workmen at wages. If wages are tolerated it must be, in the case of the individual operative, only under such conditions that by the time he is of a proper age to settle in life, he shall have accumulated enough to be an independent laborer on his own capital,—on his own farm or in his own shop. Here is our work.

Elsewhere Brownson made himself even plainer. In The Convert, an autobiography published seventeen years later, he explained that he had intended to abolish the "distinction between capitalists and laborers," the "factory system," the "banking and credit system"—the whole structure of modern progress, in short. "I wished to check commerce, to destroy speculation, and for the factory system, which we were enacting tariffs to protect and build up, to restore the old system of real home industry."

This was the political economy of republicanism, whether or not Brownson drew it from republican sources. It had very little in common

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