which he put forward the scheme for a credit bank backed by a number of decrees of a State-socialistic nature, and strongly smacking of Bismarck, he announces himself as the man who said Property is Robbery, says that he still maintains that opinion, and then goes on to defend the rights of property which he had so successfully annihilated in his first work.
But as to his political career, the 222 element he had to work in was an impossible one for the success of a man holding definite socialistic ideas. On the one hand were the Jacobins with their archaeological restorations of the ideas and politics of 1793; on the other Socialism showing itself, taking hold of people’s minds, but attempting to realise its doctrines by crude, dislocated, and consequently hopeless schemes of action. Into all these affairs Proudhon looked shrewdly and with insight, and his bitter criticisms of the confusion of the period were shown by the event to have been well founded.
Proudhon defended the modern family and monogamy in its strictest sense, and does not seem to have troubled himself to study the history of those institutions even superficially: in short, he seems to have been singularly lacking in the historical sense, and had not formed any conception of the evolution of society. Those who read his works will find themselves forced to return to his first essay, What is Property? if they are seeking in him for any consistent series of ideas. He was an eager and rough 223 controversialist, and his style is brilliant and attractive in spite of its discursiveness. Throughout his life he was thoroughly single-hearted and disinterested. In spite of his inconsistencies much of his teaching has lived, especially the side of it that thought that economic society must be based on the mutual exchange of services, and the equality of the reward of labour. Proudhon had a great influence on the French proletariat in the latter years of his life and in those immediately following his death. This influence is now completely gone. In spite of his recurrence to the crudest ideas of authoritative repression, he is the