Page:Alexander Jonas - Reporter and Socialist (1885).djvu/32

 (smilingly): You make me smile—the workman has no means to compete with the capitalist. How could he build factories, set up steam-engines and other machinery; who would give him the raw material, and how could he furnish all the other necessaries for production on a large scale?

Of course he can't. But to whom do all these necessaries, these means of labor, belong?

To the manufacturer.

Correct. And so it is in all other branches of industry. The weaver in the cotton-mills, the miners in the coal and other mines, the laborer upon the gigantic farms of Dacota and elsewhere, the clerks in the large cities and in the offices of the railroad and telegraph companies throughout the country, they all are in about the same helpless condition. For, they are dependent upon the possessors of the means of labor: i. e. the factories, the machines, the soil, the mines, the railroads and the telegraphs. And, because the capitalists, manufacturers and monopolists are in the possession of the means of life, because these means of life are inaccessible to the laboring masses, and because they will remain to be so under the present social system, therefore the so-called employers have all the social and political power concentrated in their hands, and therefore they can compel the workers to work hard for miserable wages, and to hand over to their despoilers the larger part of the wealth produced by the labor of their hands.

Therefore, the possession by the few of the complicated and gigantic means of production is the cause of the power of the few, and of the misery of the millions.

But, are not these few entitled to possess the factories, mines etc.? Did not they become their rightful owners, and this by honest means, too?

Yes, according to present laws. But who ever told you, that these laws are not protecting a great wrong, and why they should not be abolished? There are laws against the crime of usury in the different States of the Union. According to one of these laws, in one of the States it is a misdemeanor for anybody to take advantage of the trouble and difficulties in which somebody else may find himself by charging him more