Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/14

 of the expropriator," Marx has called it. Above all, those who call themselves Christians have no right to cry out against this "division," for the New Testament preaches communism in the roughest, most primitive form, and the first Christian communities that had yet the "whole pure teachings" carried out "division" with the greatest thoroughness.

Let us look at present conditions. Who will deny that the majority of mankind live in the greatest wretchedness and that only a minority have the means of attaining an existence worthy of human beings? We would refer the doubter to the statistics, whose figures admit of no reply and can be ignored only by the ignorant or the evil disposed.

The economic inequality is not, however, the worst thing. Labor creates all wealth, and were those who do not work poor this inequality would have a certain justification; in reality the situation is turned about. As the bourgeois political economist, John Stuart Mill, who is honored as an authority by our opponents, has explained with keen insight, in our present society goods are proportioned in inverse ratio to the heaviness of the labor performed. He who works the hardest generally has the least; he who does not work at all and can have others working either directly or indirectly for him has much. Poverty is the share of labor, riches the portion of the idle. The workers who have created the so-called national wealth are shut out from it. It is the monopoly of the non-workers. In this way the inequality becomes the most revolting injustice. And this injustice is a scar on our famed civilization, that every one who has a spark of the sense of justice must strive to clear away. Palliative measures that merely touch the surface merely reduce the symptoms, make the evil worse; this must