Page:Johann Jacoby - The Object of the Labor Movement - tr. Florence Kelley (1887).djvu/20

 Rh ital concentrates more and more in the hands of the small minority while the mass of wage-laborers, despite their industry, can scarcely satisfy their barest needs? The reason for this can evidently be found nowhere else than in a distribution of the product of labor disproportionate to the labor performed, and therefore, unjust.

We shall not investigate the chain of historical conditions in consequence of which the workman was gradually separated from the means of production and the present disproportion between work and wages brought about. The question now is:

What has the State done to bring about a more just distribution of the product of labor? Has it made any attempt by legislation or otherwise to protect the workingman against the superior power of capital or to set a limit to the social inequality that is growing from day to day?

Whoever scrutinizes the history of the nations down to the present day will find that in this direction practically nothing has been done.

Nobility, clergy and the higher dignitaries of State have separately and together exercised an almost exclusive control in public affairs; they have not hesitated to turn to account for themselves and their own interests power and wealth from which all should have profited equally. Legislation itself, far from distributing air and sunshine equitably in the economic race, has contributed its large share by conferring privileges on the one hand and interfering with liberty on the other, to widen and deepen the chasm between the property-holding and the non-possessing classes.

How then can any one blame the men of toil, if, having awakened to the consciousness of their rights and their power, they demand from the State a very special consideration of their so long neglected interests? When, in the article of the Zurich Constitution, State protection and State help is especially promised to the workers, there is involved in this no infringement upon the principle of equality. There is no question, as some anxious souls fear, of feeding the poor working man at the cost of the rich citizen; still less of forming a privileged class of workingmen, stipendiaries of the government. It is simply the frank and honorably outspoken recognition by the law-givers of the State's duty to do that which has been left undone and to expiate injustice committed, so righting the social wrong for which the State is, in part, responsible. It is only the wished-for fulfillment of that which we have called the demand for reconciliating and reparative justice.

But the Zurich Constitution does not stop with the recognition of the duty and responsibility of the State in general, it specifies in precise terms the means by which alone the working class can now be helped:

"The development of co-operation