Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/221

Rh world, the upward tendency of the prices of provisions and the downward tendency of the prices of manufactured products, continues to increase the wealth of the land-owner and the poverty of the factory employé. The latter is obliged to produce a constantly increasing number of manufactured goods to exchange for the agricultural products necessary to sustain life; the former receives in return for his farm produce a constantly increasing number of manufactured articles. The factory-employé finds it more and more difficult to satisfy his wants, the land-owner is able to enjoy more and more of the results of the former's labor. The number of proletaires grows daily larger, toiling for the land-owner, who is thus practically their lord and master. The wealth of the inheritor of land and houses is not increased by his own efforts, but by the faulty organization of the conditions of land-ownership according to the present economy of society. According to these conditions, the land, the natural working-tool of mankind, is placed in the hands of a few, and as a consequence the lowest classes, robbed of their share of the soil, are obliged to crowd into the great cities.

New fortunes are accumulated by trade, speculation or manufactures. We will pass by the extremely rare cases in which a man with the cooperation of chance, attains to great wealth by discovering some gold and diamond mine or petroleum springs and is able to retain and work them for his exclusive benefit. At the same time, thanks to the existing ideas of property ownership, these exceptional cases have a certain theoretical value as confutations of another so-called scientific axiom of the doctrines of political economy, viz. that capital is in all cases, accumulated labor. What labor does a diamond of the size of the Koh-i-Noor represent, which some adventurer may find on the ground in South Africa and sell for a