EVILS OF MONOPOLIES AND EXPLOITATIONS OF INDUSTRIES.
False Principle of Law-made Property--Absurdity of Funding
System and Borrowing from Investors--Evil of Public Works in
hands of Profitmongers and Speculators--Rapacity of Predatory
Classes--Efforts of Robespierre to abolish the nefarious
System--his legal Assassination in consequence--All Evils of
Society the work of Landlords and Profitmongers.
Another false principle at the root of our system (mark it well! for
it is a most diabolical one) is, that laws may legitimately _make_
property for one set of people at the expense of another set, without
the consent of the latter, and without giving them an equivalent.
This principle lurks insidiously at the root of scores of different
sorts of property, well known to exist in this country, and to be
wholly and solely the offspring of class-legislation. The dividends
payable on the National Debt are of this class of property; so are
railway dividends; so are the dividends or revenues accruing from
canals, docks, wharfs, fisheries, insurance offices, gas-companies,
water-companies, mining-companies, and private companies of all sorts,
which are chartered by private Acts of Parliament to do for the public
what the public ought to be empowered to do for themselves. There
is no subject upon which more gross and general ignorance prevails
than upon this. Most people imagine that a man may as legitimately
possess property of the kinds here alluded to, as he may possess a
house, a horse, or a gross of Birmingham buttons. No delusion can
be more ridiculous. Parliaments are chosen, and laws are designed,
not to _make_ property for people, but to _protect_ it for those who
have made it for themselves, or obtained it from those that _did_.
If a man builds a house, or buys an ox, it is his rightful property
irrespectively of Acts of Parliament. The law did not give him the
house or the ox; neither has it a right to take it away, unless for
a good and sufficient reason, and then only upon awarding adequate
compensation. The same principle applies to every other legitimate
description of property. All such legitimate descriptions of property
are acquired or made by the owners themselves, and not by the law. The
law only _protects_ such property; it does not _create_ or _make_ it.
The State plan of borrowing money from its subjects on the
perpetual-interest system is replete with folly and extravagance;
unless it be admitted to be an artful scheme for robbing the
wealth-producers, by taxing them with the payment of the interest of
money which they never borrowed. An honest government would quickly set
about paying this debt off, by offering life annuities to a certain
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
themselves 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, well knowing beforehand
that these classes wished for his death, in order to eject the
working-classes from the constitution, and re-seize the whole powers
of the State for themselves, as they had done under the Constituent.
The 9th Thermidor was as much a _coup d’état_ as Louis Napoleon’s
2nd December, and both for the same classes--for landlords and
profitmongers, who never yet submitted to any laws not made exclusively
by themselves or for themselves, at the cost of slavery to the masses.
Real liberty will never exist in the world until these two murderous
classes are made to disappear from society under the operation of just
laws on Land, Credit, Currency, and Exchange. It is to such laws that
Robespierre points in articles 6, 7, 8, and 9 of his “Declaration of
Rights;” and it is to their operation upon society he points in that
magnificent passage here quoted from his report, on _Pluviose, An II._,
the parallel of which was never before uttered by statesman:--“We
desire an order of things in which all the mean and cruel passions
shall be chained down--all the beneficent and generous passions
awakened by the laws; in which ambition shall consist in the desire
of meriting glory, and serving our country; in which distinctions
shall spring but from equality itself; in which the citizen shall
be subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the
people to justice; in which the country shall ensure the prosperity
of every individual, and in which each individual shall enjoy with
pride the prosperity and glory of his country; in which every soul
shall be aggrandised by the continual intercommunication of republican
sentiments, and by the wish to merit the esteem of a great people; in
which the arts shall flourish as the decorations of the liberty that
ennobles them; and in which commerce will be a source of public riches,
and not of monstrous opulence to a few great houses only. We desire to
substitute in our country morality for egotism, probity for honour,
principles for usages, duties for conventionalities, the empire of
reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of
misfortune, manly pride for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity,
love of glory for love of money, honesty for respectability, good
people for good society, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth
for display, the charms of happiness for the _ennui_ of pleasure, the
greatness of man for the littleness of the great; a people magnanimous,
powerful, and happy, for a people amiable, frivolous, and miserable; in
a word, we desire to substitute all the virtues and all the miracles
of the Republic for all the vices and all the ridiculous fopperies of
the Monarchy. We desire, in short, to fulfil the vows of nature, to
accomplish the destinies of humanity, to absolve Providence from the
long reign of crime and tyranny; that France, heretofore illustrious
amongst enslaved countries, may, by eclipsing all the free States that
ever existed, become a model for nations, the terror of oppressors, the
consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the world; and that, in
sealing our work with our blood, we may at least witness the breaking
dawn of universal felicity.” It was these articles and his speeches
at the Jacobin club, showing Robespierre’s determination, if he got
the power, to put _property_ on a proper basis, that determined the
landlords and profitmongers of France to murder him the moment the
state of parties and divisions of the people gave them the chance of
doing so with safety to themselves.
It is idle to attribute the evils of society to any other source but
the ascendancy of these two accursed classes; for no other component
parts of society have any interest in oppressing mankind or in
debasing humanity. Examine the other constituents of society, and
you find them all to be naturally friends and benefactors of their
fellow-creatures, and their callings to be essential to the public
welfare. All truly Christian ministers give full value for what they
get; so do physicians and surgeons; so do engineers, architects,
builders, draughtsmen, designers, artists of every kind, sculptors,
miniature and portrait painters, musicians, composers, mechanics, and
artisans of every description, whether engaged on works of usefulness
or ornament, professors and teachers of science and _belles lettres_,
more especially the higher class of scientific men, to whom we owe
inventions and discoveries, and the higher class of philosophers,
poets, historians, and critics, to whom we owe taste, refinement,
and a thousand sources of quiet enjoyment. In short, every man that
contributes, either by the labour of his brain or of his hands, to
the wealth and enjoyments of society is a valuable member of it, and
cannot possibly have an interest in keeping his fellow-creatures in
ignorance and bondage. In virtue of their callings, they, and all
other persons employed in art and education, as in production and
distribution, are naturally interested in just and good government,
and in seeing equal rights and equal laws exist for all. But not so
landlords and profitmongers: their class-interests are diametrically
opposed to the well-being, independence, and happiness of society, of
which they have not a right even to form an integral part. We cannot do
without Christian pastors, physicians, engineers, architects, builders,
professors, artists, and able men devoted to the sciences, without
relapsing into barbarism and savagery. But where is the earthly use of
a landlord, as a landlord; of a profitmonger, as a profitmonger? All
the ingenuity in the world could not point out any legitimate use for
these classes. What functions do they perform that could not be better
performed without them than with them, and at less than a hundredth
part of the cost? What business have they in society at all? They have
no lawful business whatever. They are no more a necessary part of the
body politic than are wens, tumours, or ulcers necessary parts of
the natural human body. Their presence in it is only a proof of the
diseased state of the body politic; just as the presence of the others
attests an impure state of the blood or functional disorganization.
They have no more legitimate right to obtrude themselves on society
than a wolf or a tiger has to join and make one of a Christmas party.
They exist only for the impoverishment, corruption, enslavement,
and destruction of the human race. They are the sole authors of all
the calamities known to social existence; and the history of our
race is little else than a harrowing record of their wars, plots,
conspiracies, invasions, massacres, famines, conflagrations, and
atrocities of every sort, to blot the image of God out of man, in order
to turn him into a beast of burden or a beast of prey for their own
use. It is only by just laws on Property that the human race can be
delivered from these two hellish classes; and all reform is a farce
which points not to that paramount object.
[Illustration: FINIS.]
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