Page:Friedrich Adolf Sorge - Socialism and The Worker (1876).djvu/16

 people, who are easily frightened, and thus to induce them, to defend monopoly and wholesale robbery. Socialism, on the contrary, is the true and only friend of the man of small means, for it is the party of the working people. Large property is the natural enemy of small property, as long as it has not been able to seize and devour it.

Moreover, Socialism, far from intending to abolish any property to day or to morrow, only predicts, that there will be a time, not suddenly provoked, but brought on by historical development, when the working people will insist upon their right to the product of their own work, against the privilege, which property enjoys with regard to the work of others.

The conception of "property of capital" will be transformed gradually into the conception of "property of work."

Nowhere, you will perceive, abolition of property is thought of by Socialists, and nobody, I trust, will object to the change just mentioned. The development of mankind to greater perfection never was and never will be arrested by the prevailing laws concerning property, as for instance, it was not arrested, when humanity demanded abolition of slavery, by the pretended divine right of the slave owners. And if such rights or laws demand that humanity stop its progress, such demand is madness. Laws and rights concerning property are subjected to constant changes, when such changes are in the interest of progress, and whoever will compare our notions about property with those of antiquity and the middle-ages, will not fail to perceive, that a progress has been made for the better. But also in our better institutions injustice is ruling, and the change concerning property, just spoken of will abolish that injustice and lead mankind to a higher state of perfection. At the bottom of our institutions there is a remnant of slavery; as soon as capital will cease to govern, wages-labor and this rest of slavery will be abolished.

Freedom and equality will then be no longer empty and cheap phrases, but will have a meaning; when all men are really free and equal, they will honor and advance one another. The working man will then no longer be deprived of the fruit of his work, his property, and everybody who will work, will be able to spend a good deal more for food, clothing, lodging, recreation, pleasure and instruction, than he can spend at present.

That would be all right and well, if the Socialists only did not intend to introduce community of women or "Free love," as some call it. Would that not be horrible? It would indeed! But do the Socialists really intend to introduce such a state of society, in which every man has a right to every woman?

Such a state Socialists abhor even more than those, who invented that incrimination.

Let me explain, what the Socialists think about the relation of the sexes.

The union of the sexes is elevated and sanctified by love, by