of repudiation died out, and left the restless members of our people at leisure for the reception of new theories.
Repudiation sunk, first into disrepute and then into oblivion. That form of spoliation was seen to be impracticable. Nevertheless, the desire to despoil somebody was as strong as ever it had been among the envious and unscrupulous. Desire turned itself now to the wealth of the capitalist, and thought to appropriate that. Many were the schemes devised for artificially forcing up wages, and for twisting profits out of the pockets of employers and placing them at the disposal of workmen. These schemes have not succeeded. Workmen, after long and bitter experience, have learned that the great interruptions to business, which they are able to bring about by combination, in general distress themselves far more than they do the masters; and, besides inducing temporary suffering, they permanently damage business, and so depress seriously the condition of those who join in them. During the long struggle, some of the truths regarding the wealth of societies have forced themselves on the attention of even the most violent advocates of plunder. They perceive at length that all the profits of capital, if forcibly diverted from capitalists, would yield at the moment but a sorry prey to each of those who would claim to share in them; and that the seizure of these profits would stop for an indefinite time the prosecution of business altogether, thus rendering thousands of them unemployed. So the proposed raid upon capital does not come to a head. The desire for it is as fervent as ever. But here, too, smart men are fain to defer a little to the perception that dishonesty is not good policy, and we may assume that the slackening which we see in communistic raids on industrial capital is likely to become more noteworthy, and to disappoint the authors of them.
But, as if just invented and timed to meet the emergency, and to divert dishonesty into a new channel, comes the attack upon the land. A new school of prophets has opportunely sprung up, uttering their denunciations with a difference. "It is quite right," say these instructors, "to cherish undying enmity against property, and to confiscate it for the benefit of the many; only the sages who went before us have induced you to try and breach the strong-room, where it was in fact impregnable, and so have caused you to waste your strength, time, and ammunition. They were quite right in exciting your vengeance against funded property and against industrial capital. The turn of those possessions will come by-and-by, only you cannot break in through them. You have hitherto missed the vulnerable point, which we at length, profoundly learned in such matters, here declare to you. The landlord – the landlord is your real quarry."
The attack is thus wholly drawn off from the fundholder: it is much modified, and turned into a blockade, as it were, against the industrial capitalist; but against the landlord it is being pressed with the severest vigour. When we examine the arguments by which it is sought to justify this new direction of the war, they are found to be substantially the reproductions of those which had been used without effect against property in the public funds and capital used in business. The landlord has no right to his land, which is really the property of the whole people,
