Page:Adolph Douai - Better Times (1877).djvu/12

 with the Government and States, and through Rings in all our great communities and concerns, through bankrupt Insurance Companies and Savings Banks, and in countless other ways they have robbed us; and are scheming for more such swindles. They have lulled the political watchfulness of the people to sleep, through their stump-speakers and newspapers, campaign tracts, and conspiracies between the two ruling parties. It is to them that we owe the rapid spreading of prostitution, of venality among public men and voting cattle, of beggary and pauperism, of crimes and malfeasance in office, of matrimonial scandals and rowdyism, of youthful profligacy, and of all the vices and evils of European society.

We ought, however, to reproach ourselves no less than them. We workers have tolerated their doings too long. We forgot, while prosperity lasted, "the watchfulness which is the price of liberty." We thought only of our own present advancement in the world, not of the fate of our children, and the destiny of the coming generations. We imagined that the fathers of the Republic had left us the heritage of a perfect politico-social fabric, although our dreadful four years’ Civil War should have taught us that they were erring men like all of us, and that every generation of citizens must improve their legacy, if it is to be adapted to the wants of the changing times. We have, through our recklessness, run so deeply into misery and corruption, that no slight reforms can help us out of our despondency, but that a complete, though gradual reconstruction of the entire social fabric is necessary. We are in the state of a patient who cannot be cured by any medicine, but by a thoroughly new mode of life only. In order to understand this more clearly, we must enter somewhat more fully into the nature of Capitalistic Production.

All the Old Nations had social institutions which made it impossible that any freeman could ever be helpless, disinherited, and unable to uphold his independence. He had a share in the common property of the tribe or the community, or in its proceeds, and could fall back on this last resource when all others failed. Now, at the end of the middle ages, and at the beginning of Capitalistic Production, this common property was everywhere in Europe legislated away, or first stolen by the powers that were, and the theft afterward sanctioned by law. Thus a disinherited class was artificially created, and by degrees reduced to slavery or enforced service at low rates of wages or income. This fact can be demonstrated by the very words of the laws then passed which have been preserved. As regards industrial pursuits, they were carried on in the cities by privileged guilds, which formed, at the same time, armed companies to defend their rights and cities from the robbing nobles and arbitrary