Richard T. Ely

“ As he reflects upon his wrongs and sufferings, will he not be filled with hatred towards that one who, as he thinks, unjustly and cruelly keeps him from the fruits of his labor? And as time goes on, and the hardships he endures sink more and more deeply into his mind, will he not finally, in desperation, resolve to put down his oppressor, be he landlord or be he capitalist, and to reverse, by the force of a strong right arm, an unnatural and artificial social organization? ”

“ Modern novelists have devoted themselves assiduously to the work of reform. Every oppressed class has found some one to sympathize with it and describe its wrongs. Married women, misused by their husbands; school children, maltreated by masters; orphans, wronged by tedious processes of law; the negro slave in our South—all have been made interesting, and excited our pity. The fourth estate, with which Dickens concerned himself more or less, has also found its novelist, whose skill reveals to us the laborer’s views and feelings, so that we laugh when he laughs and weep when he weeps. ”

“ In Louis Blanc’s own words: “In demanding that the right to live should be regulated, should be guaranteed, one does much more than demand that millions of unhappy beings should be rescued from the oppression of force or of chance; one embraces, in its highest generalization and in its most profound signification, the cause of humanity; one greets the Creator in his labor. Whenever the certainty of being able to live by one’s labor does not result from the essence of social institutions, iniquity reigns.” ”

“ Shorten, if it may be, our time of trial; smother inequality, pride, and avarice; confound this idolatry of glory which retains us in abjection; teach thy poor children that in the haven of liberty there are no more heroes nor grand men. Inspire the strong one, the wealthy one, whose name my lips shall never pronounce before thee, with horror on account of his robberies.... Then the great and the small, the rich and the poor, will unite in one ineffable fraternity; and all together, chanting a new hymn, will re-erect thy altar, O God of liberty and of equality! ”

“ It is needless to say that Rodbertus waged no crusade against land or capital. No one was ever so great a fool as to do that. Every social democrat, even, admits the necessity of both land and capital. He did not, however, believe that it was forever necessary that capitalists and landlords as separate classes should exist. There is the same difference between capital and capitalist as there is between labor and slave. ”

“ It is a society whose fundamental principle is competition, and competition means universal warfare. Every man’s hand is against his brother. Individualism reigns, the principle of which is that, “taking man outside of society, it renders him the sole and exclusive judge of that which surrounds him, gives him an exalted sentiment of his rights without indicating to him his duties, abandons him to his own powers, and proclaims laissez-faire as the only rule of government.” ”

“ There is no greater preservative against envy of the superior classes and contempt for the inferior than the gradual and unbroken fading of one class of society into another.... But when the rich and the poor are separated by an abyss which there is no hope of ever crossing, how pride, on the one side, and envy, on the other, rage! and especially in the centres of industry, the great cities, where the deepest [222] misery is found side by side with the most brazen-faced luxury, and where the wretched themselves, conscious of their numbers, mutually excite their own bad passions. ”

“ Books tire him, grand music wearies him, while he turns away uninterested from the greatest painting of an old master. How different are the wants of a sensitive, refined nature like Louis Blanc himself; how much larger, how much more expensive to gratify! It is, indeed, pleasant to think of society as one vast Christian family, in which each would gladly contribute to the common good in proportion to his faculties, and in which all would cheerfully accord to every member whatever he truly needed for his most perfect development. ”

“ If we examine the history of even those who are less known among the German social democrats of to-day, we shall discover that a great number have made sacrifices for their faith. Hunted about and persecuted as they are, it is assuredly no light matter to proclaim one’s self a social democrat. While, of course, among communists and socialists, selfishness, meanness, and enough that is contemptible may be found, I do not believe any movement of modern society is able to exhibit a greater amount of unselfish devotion than that they represent. ”

“ Each one cultivates his land as he pleases and works as he will, all authority being banished from the face of the earth. Can any one, without resorting to some supernatural and unwarranted theory, suppose that all would derive the same products from the same instruments? Then let us take up the case of gratuitous credit. Will all avail themselves of it with equal profit in anarchy? What is to prevent my accumulating labor receipts if my production exceeds consumption? ”

“ When the laborers were told that their wives and daughters were considered rightful booty by the wealthy, they remembered women of their class who had fallen a prey to the fascination of wealth and the elegance of the higher classes, and were angry. The peace of many of them had been ruthlessly destroyed by some rich voluptuary. Perhaps a poor father, thinking of a fair daughter, whose employer in shop or factory had taken advantage of his position and her need to seduce her, gnashed his teeth in rage, and was ready to swear eternal vengeance against the bourgeoisie. ”

“ Babylon the Great—the commercial world of selfish competition, drunken with the blood of God’s people, whose merchandise is the bodies and souls of men—her doom is gone forth. And then—then—when they, the tyrants of the earth, who lived delicately with her, rejoicing in her sins, the plutocrats and bureaucrats, the money-changers and devourers of labor, are crying to the rocks to hide them, and to the hills to cover them, from the wrath of him that sitteth on the throne ”

“ Bearing this thought in mind, even a hasty examination of the vast majority of books written on socialism and communism shows how utterly worthless they are. Their authors start out with such intense hatred of all socialistic systems, that it is simply impossible for them to understand these systems. But the worst of it is, that they couple their misunderstanding with such hard words and severe epithets as to excite bad blood and drive the various classes of society farther apart than ever. The wealthier classes lose their ardor for reform, and the poorer people become enraged. ”

“ We shall not be likely to comprehend a social system, if we approach it with coldness or, still worse, with hatred. The severe Protestant is not likely to appreciate a Madonna of Raphael, unless he is able for a time to forget his Protestantism and enter into the feelings of the devout Roman Catholic. As Carlyle so finely says, “the heart lying dead, the eye cannot see.” So, to obtain an adequate idea of socialism and of the justice of its claims, we must imagine ourselves for the time being laborers, with all their trials and sufferings. ”

“ Now let us see how this produces pauperism and crises.
In society we find laborers, capitalists, and landlords. These classes can exist only because there is a division of labor, and laborers produce more than they consume. Landlords and capitalists receive what is called rent, which is any income derived from the fact of possession and not from labor. All the rest is labor’s share. Now how does it happen that rent-receiving classes are able to exist? in other words, how is one man enabled to take from another a part of the fruits of his labor? ”

“ Land and capital constitute the instruments of labor, and without them production is impossible. Their possessors refuse to give them up to another’s use unless a share of the produce is guaranteed them therefor, while the laborer’s hunger and the sufferings of his family compel him to assent. Labor is treated as a commodity. It is bought and sold like other commodities, and its value depends on its cost. What is the cost of labor? ”

“ Those who do so cannot understand the social democrats. The very corner-stone of their belief is that the individual is not responsible for the present condition of things; that harmony can be secured only by the combined action of society—by a social, and not by an individual, regeneration. All that the individual can do, they hold, is to labor for the overthrow of existing society and the establishment of the people’s state, and in the meanwhile to live like other people. ”

“ It is possible, it foreshadows a tragedy of world-wide import, which shall make all the cruelty and terror of the French Revolution sink into utter insignificance. It is possible, it portends the destruction of old, antiquated institutions, and the birth of a new civilization in a night of darkness and horror, in which the roll of thunder shall shake the earth’s foundations, and the vivid glare of lightning shall reveal a carnival of bloodshed and slaughter. ”

“ IX. Free association, liberty, which confines itself to the maintenance of equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchanges, is the only form of society possible, just, and true.
“X. Politics is the science of liberty; the government of man by man, under whatever name it may disguise itself, is oppression. ”

“ It is a relief to turn one’s attention to the plans of Étienne Cabet. They, at least, have the merit of not robbing life of all poetry, sentiment, and trust in something higher and better than food and drink. One might find life tolerable in one of Cabet’s communes; but every noble soul will acknowledge that if life’s ends and aims are all to centre in a full stomach and a warm cloak, then, indeed, life is not worth the living. ”

“ Does the laborer’s standard of life rise with the increase in productivity of economic forces? No, it is even doubtful whether it is rising at all. Then the conclusion is inevitable that labor’s proportion or quota decreases. Rodbertus thinks he can prove, from the income returns in England since 1800, and from the division of the national product of England into rent, wages, and profits, that the increased production of machine power, estimated as equal to the labor of five hundred and fifty millions of men, has benefited wholly and entirely landlords and capitalists. ”

“ The second theory of property is the labor theory. But this theory likewise destroys property. That only is mine which I produce. The earth is mine only so long as I cultivate it. The moment another labors on my farm it becomes his property. Again, labor presupposes the instruments of labor, and where is one to obtain these in a system of private, personal property, provided one does not already possess them? The theory of labor demands the abolition of property, in order that every one may have free access to the soil and to the other instruments of labor. ”