Page:Adolph Douai - Better Times (1877).djvu/20

 the laws imposed by England, and destroyed many vested rights and properties, and their names have come down to us revered and immortal. Every revolution destroys some vested and property rights, and the only difference there is between a revolution which is forever extolled and a riot against capital which is condemned is, that the former is successful, because upheld by a majority, and the latter is not.

We come to the last argument which proves that capital is legalized robbery. There could no capital whatever exist, if there did not exist private property in land. And for three reasons: 1. The laws which sanction private property in land, cause sooner or later a majority of citizens to be poor, and dependent for their livelihood on the owners of he means of labor. The greater the number of the landless, and the more dependent their condition, the greater is also their competition for employment; and the more the rate of wages is lowered, the greater is the rate of employers' profits—which are the origin of capital. In this downward tendency of wages the capitalists who are engaged in the same kind of production lend a helping hand. They compete among themselves to secure the best market for their merchandise, and the more so, the more there are countries with Capitalistic Production and varied industry, whose producers compete for the world's market. In this competition the greater capitals which can apply all the most modern improvements of production on a large scale, have advantages over the smaller. The greater the profits, the greater can be the accumulation of capital. The smaller the rate of wages, the greater can be the profits. Thus it is a double competition, that of the capitalists of all the world, and that of the laborers of all the world, which grinds, as between millstones, the laborers to dust, and reduces the large number of small capitalists to a small number of large capitalists, or real monopolists. 2. When private property in land is sanctioned, money becomes a far more valuable property than before, because it now can buy land. When land can lawfully be bought, sold, mortgaged, and encumbered, it is the best of all securities for money, and these two kinds of merchandise enhance each other in price, while that of labor sinks. When money can be exchanged for real estate, it can no longer be stolen, lost, burned, or annihilated, and for this reason it grows more valuable. When land can be sold or mortgaged, it assumes all the privileges of money, it becomes a value easy to exchange, to transport (the title, of course) to speculate with it, and to bring greater returns by improvements with borrowed money. Besides, when land can be sold or mortgaged, a far greater amount of money is needed to carry