Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/157

 *selves masters of society, and are everywhere in a state of permanent conspiracy against the rest of the community, allowing no man to hold his proper rank or position in the world unless he makes common cause with them in keeping the poor and the labouring class in ignorance, poverty, and slavery. There is no age nor country in which they have not shown themselves murderers or assassins the moment any large section of the public began to see through their system of self-licensed rapine. They have invariably either murdered the leaders and teachers of the creed which menaced their usurpations, or else got up sham wars with neighbouring States (the belligerents being co-conspirators), under colour of which they procured the intervention of foreign arms in aid of their own, to crush the new creed and its abettors before they had time to take root. No one nation on earth has, up to the present time, been permitted to learn, much less establish, honest laws on Land, Credit, Currency, and Exchange, so as to secure its permanent freedom and happiness, owing to malignant combinations of these two classes, which seem to exist for no other purpose than to keep the human race in eternal chains and misery.

Robespierre is the only legislator and statesman known to history who sought a radical reformation of society for the millions, through just fundamental laws on property, with analogous institutions to reach and purify every department of the State, so that the poorest man in France might get rich through his own industry if he chose to work, and have the whole armed power of society to guarantee to him the exclusive ownership and enjoyment of his earnings and accumulations. But at the same time he left to the rich all they had, depriving them only of the power of future robbery. To this end were directed articles 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 of his "Declaration of Rights:"—"Art. 6. Property is the right which each citizen has to enjoy and to dispose of, at his pleasure, the portion of fortune or wealth that is guaranteed to him by the law. Art. 7. The right of property is limited, like all other rights, by the obligation to respect the rights of others. Art. 8. It can prejudice neither the safety, nor the liberty, nor the existence, nor the property of our fellow-citizens. Art. 9. All traffic that violates this principle is essentially illicit and immoral. Art. 10. Society is under obligation to provide subsistence for all its members, either by procuring employment for them or by ensuring the means of existence to those who are incapable of labour. Art. 11. The relief indispensable to those who are in want of necessaries is a debt due by the possessors of superfluities. It belongs to the law to determine the manner in which the debt should be discharged. Art. 12. Citizens whose incomes do not exceed what is necessary to their subsistence are dispensed from contributing to the public expenditure. The rest ought to contribute progressively, according to the extent of their fortunes."

Although Robespierre and his party were ostensibly murdered by the Convention, it was the landlords and profitmongers of France that were really and substantially his murderers in chief; for it was in their interest the Convention murdered him,