Page:Friedrich Adolf Sorge - Socialism and The Worker (1890).pdf/8

 from exposure and hunger. You need not go far, reader, you will find them everywhere. Ragged, pale-faced, despairing people will meet your gaze, and on enquiring you will learn that they were industrious, orderly workers, and that there are thousands, aye, hundreds of thousands of people living in the same miserable condition, in the cities as well as in the country.

Now look at the mechanics. A few of them may succeed; they may be able to reach a state in which they are safe from sorrow and care for the necessaries of life. The greater number of mechanics who have a little shop of their own and work on a small scale have to battle with poverty and care. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of mechanics fail in this battle; they give up their small establishments and turn wage-labourers. One manufacturer on a large scale deprives hundreds of small mechanics of their independent existence; one large shop or "co-operative store" crushes out fifty small shopkeepers. As things stand to-day, only those will succeed in the great struggle for life, in the universal competition, who command large means, a great amount of capital.

In commerce it is the same; merchants with small means rarely do a good business many go bankrupt. Merchants with large means grow richer and richer. It is similar with farmers throughout the civilized countries of Europe and America. Owners of small farms just eke out a scanty living and have to work very hard; many gradually fall off; in general the peasantry get poorer. There is the usurer, who knows how to make a profit of a poor crop. Very frequently, we find that small farms are bought by owners of large farms to be united with them. Only the latter understand the business and are able to farm with profit.

Thus we see how the large class of those who work hard and assiduously do not make money, do not amass riches—on the contrary, many of them must suffer from want and care. But now, who creates these riches which fall to those who never worked, or whose work hardly deserves the name of work? Who else, but that self-same working-class?

For industry and work scarcely a living! Riches for those who never or seldom did anything useful! Do you call that just? Can you approve of such a state of things? I know you cannot. No sensible man can approve of it. And now say what you may against Socialists—in this point they are right. This state of things cannot and must not continue. It is wrong, and therefore it must be changed. Socialists do not object to acquisitions made by honest work; on the contrary, they try to secure the product of work to the worker himself, and to protect it from the clutches of those who hitherto have been accustomed, not to work themselves, but only to draw profit from the work of others, and who, in doing so, are not content with a small part, but try to take the lion’s share as it is in the fable.

But do the Socialists not go too far in their zeal? It would, certainly, be well and just if it could be accomplished, that those who toil and work should be liberated from care and want, and those who have been idle so far should be forced to work also. But are