The slave of antiquity was, it is true, the absolute property of his master, of the free man, and he was condemned to well nigh an animal existence, but it was to the interest of his master to assure him daily bread at the least, for the slave formed a part of his estate, like his cattle and horses.
Just so, the serf or villein of the Middle Ages enjoyed certain customary rights which attached him to the soil and assured him at the least—save in case of famine—of daily bread.
The free wage-worker of the modern world, on the contrary, is always condemned to labor inhuman both in its duration and its character, and this is the justification of that demand for an Eight-Hours day which can already count more than one victory and which is destined to a sure triumph. As no permanent legal relation binds the wage-slave either to the capitalist proprietor or to the soil, his daily bread is not assured to him, because the proprietor no longer has any interest to feed and support the laborers who toil in his factory or on his field. The death or sickness of the laborer cannot, in fact, cause any decrease of his estate and he can always draw from the inexhaustible multitude of laborers who are forced by lack of employment to offer themselves on the market.
That is why—not because present-day proprietors are more wicked than those of former times, but because even the moral sentiments are the result of economic conditions—the landed proprietor or the superintendent of his estate hastens to have a veterinary called if, in his stable, a cow becomes ill, while he is in no hurry to have a doctor called if it is the son of the cow-herd who is attacked by disease.
Certainly there may be—and these are more or less frequent exceptions—here and there a proprietor who contradicts this rule, especially when he lives in daily contact with his laborers. Neither can it be denied that the rich classes are moved at times by the spirit of benevolence—even apart from the charity fad—and that they thus put to rest the inner voice, the symptom of the moral disease from which they suffer, but the inexorable rule is nevertheless as follows: with the modern form of industry the laborer has gained political liberty, the right of suffrage, of association, etc. (rights which he is allowed to use only when he does not utilize them to form a class-party, based on intelligent apprehension of the essential point of the social question), but he has lost the guarantee of daily bread and of a home.
Socialism wishes to give this guarantee to all individuals—and it demonstrates the mathematical possibility of this by the substitution of social ownership for individual ownership of the means of production—but it does not follow from this that socialism will do away with all the useful and truly fruitful conquests of the present phase of civilization, and of the preceding phases.
And here is a characteristic example of this: the invention of industrial and agricultural machinery, that marvelous application of science to the transformation of natural forces which ought to have had only beneficent consequences, has caused and is still causing the misery and ruin of thousands and thousands of laborers. The substitution of machines for human labor has inevitably condemned multitudes of workers to the tortures of enforced idleness and to the ruthless action of the iron law of minimum wages barely sufficient to prevent them from dying of hunger.
The first instinctive reaction or impulse of these unfortunates was and still is, unhappily, to destroy the machines and to see in them only the instruments of their undeserved sufferings.
But the destruction of the machines would be, in fact, only a pure and simple return to barbarism, and this is not the wish or purpose of socialism which represents a higher phase of human civilization.
And this is why socialism alone can furnish a solution of this tragic difficulty which can not be solved by economic individualism which involves the constant employment and introduction of improved machinery because its use gives an evident and irresistible advantage to the capitalist.