Page:Adolph Douai - Better Times (1877).djvu/25

 produce the highest culture of ancient times, one or two miserable paupers, beggars, robbers, or boors now toil for the sole benefit of a few worthless nabobs. It is time in our own country that we should learn from such dreadful examples.

It would no doubt be an unwise policy to begin the fight against capitalism where its power originated, in the many small real estate owners, who may have escaped the swallowing jaws of capital. The real root of the evil is not the owners of the soil, much less the small owners—the real root is a principle, a false opinion and _ practice. The error is that there can be a private property in what we do not create, and that error leads to the immoral principle that it may be lawful and just to appropriate a portion of the fruit of the labor of others. And all the dangers, all the social ills that flow from that principle and its capitalistic consequences, may be uprooted by a law that forbids all sales of real estate after a certain year in the future; every sale after that date to be a sale to the state or government for a personal income during the life of the seller—or some other measure which puts an end to the money value of land.

From the moment that such a law is passed, the price of land, and with it that of money will gradually sink, and the price of labor will rise proportionally. Indeed, the transition from the present immoral and ruinous state of society to a prosperous future society built on moral principles, may be rendered as slow, gradual, and safe as is desirable to the majority of voters, but it cannot help being a sudden, revolutionary, and stormy transition if it be long delayed. It is perfectly in the power of our voters to adopt or to reject a moral and just principle in matters of property, but it is not in their power to prevent its natural effects. An immoral and unjust principle in property legislation will, with an iron force, and by and by with the velocity of steam, overthrow the prosperity of the people and the constitution of the state, and has, in bygone centuries, entirely wiped out many a nation and its culture. A moral and just principle in property laws, being akin to our better nature, will cure one after another the ills of Society.

The system of Capitalistic Production creates wealth for the few through the unpaid portion of the labor of the many. The system of Wages Labor is but another name for that of Capitalistic Production. All over the civilized world the loud cry of the masses is heard that Wages Labor must give way to Co-operation of the laborers, and it will soon be followed by the filling up of legislatures with real laborers only,