(gleaned in the latter case from no less than six different writers), to show that they are virtually the same. He denominates it the "Eternal Decalogue," and declares that obedience to it is the first essential of social organization. He enumerates seven essentials to the upbuilding of the social edifice. The first, as stated, is the decalogue, and this, with the second, paternal authority, are the two foundation-stones that must be permanent and inseparable. What he calls the "two cements" are religion and the authority of the state; while the "three materials" are the three forms of land-holding, communal, individual, and tributary.
Surely, Le Play is to be classed with "the social architects," yet he and his followers have always inveighed against "the dogmatists of '89," against the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierites, and all others who believed that they had "discovered" the perfect society while groping amid the shadows of an idealized antiquity, or through the cloudlands of their inner consciousness. The "golden age" in which Le Play believed was not of the past only, nor of the future only, but exists whenever and wherever a people fears God and keeps his commandments. His elaborate specifications regarding "the essential organization" of society claim to be only descriptions of what is always found in a society where peace and happiness obtain. He had labored long and faithfully at the task of social analysis, and, when at length he turned to the work of synthesis, it was his firm conviction that in the three volumes, "L'Organisation du Travail," "L'Organisation de la Famille," and "La Constitution Essentielle de l'Humanité," he did nothing more than bring together the influences which rigidly scientific investigation had proved to be the indispensable sources of man's welfare. Among all the races that enjoy social peace and stability he found the solidarity of the family intact; he found that this form of organization gave the best opportunity for the effective training of the children in the moral law; and he concluded that the chaotic and unsatisfactory condition of the foremost nations of Europe resulted from the breaking down of the almost patriarchal system in which he was learning to believe, from the "infinite morselization" (morcellement infini) of interests, from that division of labor which compels the father of a family to be too much of a drudge ever to be a guide, and leaves his children's education to the precarious chances of right management at the hands of various sorts of specialists. He dared to say flatly, for his own country, that her politics and social state were the most unsettled in Europe because her morals were the worst, that her laborers were restless and dissatisfied because they were vicious, because "the system of adultery, instituted with éclat at the court of Versailles, had led to the public concubinage which now desolates the Parisian workshops."
A remedy for existing evils, he believed, could not be found by ingenious theorizing, but only by the development and application of
