The present organization of private property with no restrictions upon the right of inheritance by descent or upon personal accumulation; the ever increasing and more perfect application of scientific discoveries to the facilitation of human labor—­the labor of adapting the materials furnished by Nature to human needs; the telegraph and the steam-engine, the constantly overflowing torrent of human migrations—­all these bind, with invisible but infrangible threads, the existence of a family of peasants, work-people or petty trades-people to the life of the whole world.  And the harvest of coffee, cotton or wheat in the most distant countries makes its effects felt in all parts of the civilized world, just as the decrease or increase of the sun-spots are phenomena co-incident with the periodical agricultural crises and have a direct influence on the destinies of millions of men.

This magnificent scientific conception of the “unity of physical forces,” to use the expression of P. Secchi, or of universal solidarity is far, indeed, from that infantile conception which finds the causes of human phenomena in the free wills of individuals.

If a socialist were to attempt, even for philanthropic purposes, to establish a factory in order to give work to the unemployed, and if he were to produce articles out of fashion or for which there was no general demand, he would soon become bankrupt in spite of his philanthropic intentions by an inevitable effect of inexorable economic laws.

Or, again, if a socialist should give the laborers in his establishment wages two or three times as high as the current rate of wages, he would evidently have the same fate, since he would be dominated by the same economic laws, and he would have to sell his commodities at a loss or keep them unsold in his warehouses, because his prices for the same qualities of goods would be above the market price.

He would be declared a bankrupt and the only consolation the world would offer him would be to call him an honest man (brave homme); and in the present phase of “mercantile ethics” we know what this expression means.[39]

Therefore, without regard to the personal relations, more or less cordial, between capitalists and workingmen, their respective economic situations are inexorably determined by the present (industrial) organization, in accordance with the law of surplus-labor which enabled Marx to explain and demonstrate irrefutably how the capitalist is able to accumulate wealth without working,—­because the laborer produces in his day’s work an amount of wealth exceeding in value the wage he receives, and this surplus-product forms the gratuitous (unearned) profit of the capitalist.  Even if we deduct from the total profits his pay for technical and administrative superintendence, this unearned surplus-product still remains.

Land, abandoned to the sun and the rain, does not, of itself, produce either wheat or wine.  Minerals do not come forth, unaided, from the bowels of the earth.  A bag of dollars shut up in a safe does not produce dollars, as a cow produces calves.