Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/113

94 property is in the hands of a minority. There is therefore danger lest the former use the political power to plunder the latter, unless the latter conciliate the former by timely concessions." If this were the question, it would, no doubt, be serious enough. It would mean that political institutions are not the safeguard of liberty and property under democracy, any more than they were such under older political forms; but that they are still only convenient means for those who can control the institutions to violate liberty and property to their own advantage. It would mean that all our boasted political progress was in question, for institutions that cannot guarantee property cannot be stable. Democracy would either have to yield at once to communism, as the only realization of its own principles, or it would be overthrown by a monarchical reaction to secure property. Furthermore, if the question were as stated, it would be one that would arise amongst the property classes, and would be suggested by alarm for their interests; it would not be a question raised amongst the employed, and bearing on their struggle for their interests. The question would therefore be a political question and a property question; it would not be a labor question.

If I attempt, out of the vague, sentimental, and declamatory expressions of the parties interested, and their friends, to formulate the question they try to raise, it seems to me to be this: How can those who have neither land nor capital, and who must therefore enter the organization of society as wage-workers, get their living, or get a better living, or get more than they now get out of the stock of goods in society, for the productive effort which they put into the work of society? The socialists answer this question by saying that a committee should