Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/156

 number of stock-holders every year. A real State power ought never to borrow money; it ought to make it when required to cancel its obligations, receiving the same money back in the form of taxes, so as to prevent depreciation. The government practice of borrowing money on Exchequer bills is also absurdly wasteful; surely the credit of the State ought to be above that of any of its subjects!

What is true of funded property is equally applicable to the various other descriptions of property referred to. Railroads should not be private property; neither should canals, docks, fisheries, mines, the supplying of gas, water, etc. Works of this sort, designed for the use of the public, should be constructed or executed only at the public cost, and the public, and the public only, should have the advantage. They should not be suffered to fall into the hands of private speculators, for whom they are only a legal disguise to enable them to rob the public. A universal-suffrage parliament would never sanction such a system, unless it were stark mad. Like the funding system, it only tends to breed idle schemers to prey upon the industrious classes. All profits upon their outlay received by such private companies, while they preserve their capital intact, is in reality so much public plunder handed over to them by the law. Indeed, not unfrequently the profits for a single year are greater than the outlay itself, whilst the original shares are proportionately enhanced in value. Thus, shares in the New River Company, originally worth £100, are now worth £16,000; in other words, the annual interest is equal to eight times the original capital. It is superfluous to say such property is the sole creation of law, which, whenever it deviates from its original function of protecting property, to that of creating or making it, only robs one set of people to enrich another—a species of act which laws are intended to punish, and not to set the example of.

The mercantile middle-classes are everywhere organizing chartered companies to give themselves perpetual vested interests in the labour of the working-classes, and mortgage the latter to posterity, through public loans and State indebtedness. Wars are now got up or waged every year merely to create fresh batches of "stocks" or "public securities" to be thrown, as marketable wares, upon the stock-exchanges of the world, in order that lazy, worthless, swindling villains, who have got rich by profitmongering, may be able to convert definite money-capitals into interminable annuities, or perennial streams of income wrung from the labouring classes in taxes, for which the said classes never receive a particle of consideration or value in any shape, while the "investors," as they are called, not only retain their money-capitals under the name of stock, but, as a general rule, can always sell that stock at a premium, or for more than the sum originally lent or invested; while, till they choose to sell out, they are privileged to live securely on the taxes.

All slavery in all countries called civilised is the work of landlords and profitmongers. These two classes, which have no right to form an integral portion of society at all, have everywhere made them