Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/590

 of the workmen who are employed, and accordingly that it is they who draw the profit from the labor of the latter, will, in defiance of this, not allow the latter even a share in the product of their own work, not even a share of what labor has a just claim to. Workingmen with workingmen's means and employers' hearts—that is the repulsive caricature into which those workingmen have been changed.

And now finally one more clear and decisive proof based on these facts. You have seen that in that factory of the Pioneers five hundred workmen were employed and sixteen hundred workingmen held the stock. This much must also be clear to you—that, unless we are willing to imagine the workmen as rich people (in which case all questions are solved—in imagination), the capital necessary for the establishment of a factory can never be raised from the pockets of the workmen employed in it. They will be obliged to take in a much greater number of other workingmen stockholders, who are not employed in their factory. In this respect the proportion in the case of that factory of the Pioneers—sixteen hundred stockholders to five hundred workingmen in the factory (say a proportion of only about three to one)—may be called astonishingly favorable and unusual—as small as is in any way possible, and to be accounted for partly by the especially fortunate situation of the Pioneers, who represent a great exception in the working class, partly by the fact that this branch of manufacturing is far from being one of those which require the heaviest capitalization, and partly because this factory is not large enough to count among the really large enterprises, for in these the proportion, even in this branch of industry, would be a very different one. And, finally, it may be added that through the development of industrialism itself, and through the progress of civilization, this proportion must increase daily. For the progress of civilization consists in the very fact that from day to day more natural mechanical power—more machinery—takes the place of human labor, and that accordingly the proportion