You are then brought to this conclusion, that, according to your pretended friends, the protective system has been created and brought into the world in order that capitalists might be sacrificed to laborers!
Tell me, is that probable?
Where is your place in the Chamber of Peers? When did you sit at the Palais Bourbon? Who has consulted you? Whence came this idea of establishing the protective system?
I hear your answer: We did not establish it. We are neither Peers nor Deputies, nor Counselors of State. The capitalists have done it.
By heavens, they were in a delectable mood that day. What! the capitalists made this law; they established the prohibitive system, so that you laborers should make profits at their expense!
But here is something stranger still.
How is it that your pretended friends who speak to you now of the goodness, generosity and self-denial of capitalists, constantly express regret that you do not enjoy your political rights? From their point of view, what could you do with them? The capitalists have the monopoly of legislation, it is true. Thanks to this monopoly, they have granted themselves the monopoly of iron, cloth, coal, wood and meat, which is also true. But now your pretended friends say that the capitalists, in acting thus, have stripped themselves, without being obliged to do it, to enrich you without your being entitled to it. Surely, if you were electors and deputies, you could not manage your affairs better; you would not even manage them as well.
If the industrial organization which rules us is made in your interest, it is a perfidy to demand political rights for you; for these democrats of a new species can never get out of this dilemma; the law, made by the present law-makers, gives you more, or gives you less, than your natural wages. If it gives you less, they deceive you in inviting you to support it. If it gives you more, they deceive you again by calling on you to claim political rights, when those who now exercise them, make sacrifices for you which you, in your honesty, could not yourselves vote.
Workingmen, God forbid that the effect of this article should be to cast in your hearts the germs of irritation against the rich. If mistaken interests still support monopoly, let us not forget that it has its root in errors, which are common to capitalists and workmen. Then, far from laboring to excite them against one another, let us strive to bring them together. What must be done to accomplish this? If it is true that the natural social tendencies aid in effacing inequality among men, all we have to do to let those tendencies act is to remove the artificial obstructions which interfere with their operation, and allow the relations of different classes to establish themselves on the principle of justice, which, to my mind, is the principle of FREEDOM.