The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more or less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage-earners. From day to day it becomes more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more vigorously than Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man should give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of cities, and especially of large cities, prevents this. When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure is dumped into the sea every day than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony, at an enormous expense, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis. And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own filth for at least thirty years.
On the other hand, it is utterly utopian to want, like Proudhon, to transform today's bourgeois society while preserving the peasant as such. Only the most equal possible distribution of the population throughout the country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production, together with the necessary extension of the means of communication - which presupposes the abolition of the capitalist mode of production - would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has been vegetating almost unchanged for thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of humanity from the chains that its historical past has forged will not be complete until the antithesis between town and country has been abolished; utopia begins when one undertakes "from existing conditions" to prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of present-day society is to be resolved.