Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/230

216 hire labor at the lowest prices, and the absence of competition or other circumstances, make it possible for him to sell his manufactured articles at a very high price, he does not entertain the idea of limiting his income to six or ten per cent, but he bends all his energies to making a hundred or even more per cent on the capital employed. The advocates of this plundering of labor by Capital say that the division of this net income of the factory between the capitalist and the laborer would only keep the former poor, while raising the wages of the latter so slightly as to be immaterial, amounting to merely a few pennies a day, divided among so many. A noble, a modest argument forsooth! It is possible that the wages-receiver might receive only a few pennies more a day, if he were able to retain for himself all the fruits of his daily labor. But by what right is he obliged to present his employer with even the tiniest share of his daily earnings, when the employer has already the interest on his capital and a sufficient remuneration for his problematical mental labor? Let us imagine for a moment that every inhabitant of the German Empire were forced by law to pay a penny every year to some Smith or Meyer, not in return for any services performed, nor in gratitude for any benefit he might have rendered to the community, but as a simple present. The favored individual would thus be ensured a yearly income of about a hundred thousand dollars; but none of the contributors would feel the loss of their penny. One penny! that is such a small amount that it is not worth the trouble of speaking about it. And yet such a law would elicit from the entire nation a cry of indignation, and every citizen would revolt against its arbitrary injustice. But the economical law which obliges the poorest part of the nation, the factory employés, to present to this same Smith or Meyer, a contribution of not one cent, but of ten