Page:Johann Jacoby - The Object of the Labor Movement - tr. Florence Kelley (1887).djvu/17

 16 from the Past, namely that, thanks to the German Reformation and the French Revolution, the conviction gains ground from day to day in ever-widening circles down to the lowest strata, that it cannot go on so forever, that men are not created to be ruled and governed, held in leading strings and oppressed by their fellow-men. For thousands of years love of one's neighbor and the fellowship of man have been preached to the people. The present demands that in every deed, in daily life, in the State and Society this teaching be applied in earnest.

There was a time—the older among you remember it—when everyone who doubted the right of absolute government was branded a rebel. To-day a similar fate is the lot of everyone who ventures to lay hands upon the "chain of economic phenomena." Do but venture to attack the privilege of the possessing class, the abuse of power by Capital, the prevailing credit and loan system, or even to broach a more equal distribution of material goods, and you are in certain circles branded forthwith as the enemy of all social order, a social heretic, a Communist. But this shall not deter me from recognizing freely and publicly that all individual property, material not less than intellectual, is the common good of society. Like man himself, every form of the property of man possesses, besides its special character which makes it the private possession of an individual, a universal side which men gives the community a well-grounded claim to a right to it. That the State and the municipality appropriate a part of the property of every citizen as taxes we all consider a matter of course, or that the law limits the free control of the individual's property. But, we ask, has the property-holder no other duties than those which the law of the land prescribes and in case of need compels him to fulfil? Has he not duties to society as well as to the family, the municipality, the commonwealth? What the individual calls his own, whether of real or personal property, is it, can it be solely the product of his own activity? Does he not owe by far the greater part of it to the co-operation of others, to the social labor, the labor in common, of the people who have lived before him and of his contemporaries? And as the individual attains possession of property only by means of the help of others, so he cannot enjoy its fruits without the help of others. Only in society has property value, only in society can man rejoice in it. Hence the moral obligation of every owner of property so to use his fortune that it may be of use not to himself alone but to the community as well, especially to those of his fellow men who are less favorably placed than himself.

The grand Labor Movement of the last forty years has had a wholesome effect in this respect. As it has awakened in the workman the consciousness of his social rights, so has it sharpened