— 6 —
All the teachings of religion and philosphy are ridiculed by the practices of State and church, legislation and intercourse, even in Christian countries! Nations professing the religion of universal brotherhood carry on wars with the most perfect means of murder and destruction that may be imagined. Millions of soldiers in the Old World, and even in the New, are kept on foot, avowedly to guard the peace among nations who worship as God the great herald of "Peace on earth and good will among men!" The very language is full of hypocrisy and deception. Industry is nowadays the means of supporting, by overwork of a majority, in idleness and sensuous luxury, a minority which cannot even claim any merits! "Law and Order" are pretexts for throwing mankind into a state of anarchy and all but universal dissatisfaction!
They call wages labor—"free labor"—while it must be sold afresh from day to day, in order to continue existence; they call it a free contract when the disinherited worker has no longer his own means of labor, but must work for an owner of means of labor at a rate of wages which amounts, as a rule, to hardly half of the product of his labor. They call capital the one portion of the proceeds of labor which is not consumed, but accumulated for further production, and they omit to mention that it is the one portion of the proceeds of labor which is withheld from the laborer, of which he is robbed under the permission of law; in short, that capital is the accumulated stealings and pickings from the property of other men. They call property what is not the fruit of one's own labor, while there cannot be any other reasonable title to property than work. And this list of hypocritical confusion of terms might be lengthened ad libitum. In fact, all institutions of society and law are nowadays hypocritical, and demoralize the public sense of truth and honesty.
It is the merit of Social Democracy to have established this new cognition and science. It has cleared up what never could be explained by the old political economy: the cause of commercial crises; of the impoverishment of the majority in every nation; of the enormous opposites in the condition of men. It is no longer a marvel why there can be and are hundredfold millionaires here, and an abject poverty of a mass of proletarians there; why commercial crises are spread likewise over republics and monarchies and despotical States, over protectionist and free trade countries, over Protestant, Catholic, and other communities; why all the "statesmen" and wiseacres of the press are utterly unable to suggest a thorough remedy to commercial depressions and the division of mankind into a ruling class and a ruled class, into all-powerful money kings and moneyed corporations on the one hand, and an immense majority of paupers, or what must ultimately
