Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/233

Rh the wayfarer of his purse, first knocking him down with his club. When the manufacturer becomes a Crœsus, it is by systematic plundering of his workmen, who receive for their exertions in his behalf, nothing more than food and shelter, like so many domestic animals, and both the very scantiest possible. The entire results of their labors flow into the money bags of their master.

It is in this sense that we must construe Proudhon's exaggerated and therefore false assertion that property is theft. We can only make it seem true by placing ourselves upon the sophistical standpoint that everything that exists is created for itself, and from the fact of its existence, deduces the right to belong to itself. According to this idea we are stealing when we pick a blade of grass, when we inhale the air, or catch a fish. The swallow is stealing when it eats a fly, the worm when it eats its way into the heart of the tree; all nature is peopled by arch thieves, everything that has life is constantly stealing, taking materials that do not belong to it, eating, inhaling and making them part of its organism in any and every way. The only instance of absolute freedom from stealing on this mundane sphere, according to this view, would be a bar of platinum, which takes nothing from other objects, not even oxygen from the air to form rust on its surface. No, property is not theft when it arises from trade, that is, from the exchange of a certain measure or labor for a corresponding measure of goods. But an enormous capital, that is the accumulation of vast amounts of property in the hands of one man, such as no individual would be able to amass as the results of his own labor, even at its very highest valuation, such fortunes are due to the robbery of the laboring classes.

This band of robbers, for whom the whole community toils, is powerfully organized. It has, in the first place,