Now let us see what modern experience and modern sociology has to say
to the teaching of Jesus as summarized here. First, get rid of your
property by throwing it into the common stock. One can hear the
Pharisees of Jerusalem and Chorazin and Bethsaida saying, "My good
fellow, if you were to divide up the wealth of Judea equally today,
before the end of the year you would have rich and poor, poverty and
affluence, just as you have today; for there will always be the idle
and the industrious, the thrifty and the wasteful, the drunken and the
sober; and, as you yourself have very justly observed, the poor we shall
have always with us." And we can hear the reply, "Woe unto you, liars
and hypocrites; for ye have this very day divided up the wealth of
the country yourselves, as must be done every day (for man liveth not
otherwise than from hand to mouth, nor can fish and eggs endure for
ever); and ye have divided it unjustly; also ye have said that my
reproach to you for having the poor always with you was a law unto you
that this evil should persist and stink in the nostrils of God to all
eternity; wherefore I think that Lazarus will yet see you beside Dives
in hell." Modern Capitalism has made short work of the primitive pleas
for inequality. The Pharisees themselves have organized communism in
capital. Joint stock is the order of the day. An attempt to return
to individual properties as the basis of our production would smash
civilization more completely than ten revolutions. You cannot get the
fields tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator. Take
the shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to you the
particular length of rail, the particular seat in the railway carriage,
the particular lever in the engine that is his very own and nobody
else's; and he will shun you as a madman, very wisely. And if, like
Ananias and Sapphira, you try to hold back your little shop or what not
from the common stock, represented by the Trust, or Combine, or Kartel,
the Trust will presently freeze you out and rope you in and finally
strike you dead industrially as thoroughly as St. Peter himself. There
is no longer any practical question open as to Communism in production:
the struggle today is over the distribution of the product: that is,
over the daily dividing-up which is the first necessity of organized
society.