Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we shall avoid disputes about words.
Thus, communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience, and equality: the first, by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart, and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labor and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality in point of comfort. For the rest, if property is impossible on account of the desire to accumulate, communism would soon become so through the desire to shirk.
II. Property, in its turn, violates equality by the rights of exclusion and increase, and freedom by despotism. The former effect of property having been sufficiently developed in the last three chapters, I will content myself here with establishing by a final comparison, its perfect identity with robbery.
The Latin words for robber are fur and latro; the former taken from the Greek {GREEK m }, from {GREEK m }, Latin fero, I carry away; the latter from {GREEK 'i }, I play the part of a brigand, which is derived from {GREEK i }, Latin lateo, I conceal myself. The Greeks have also {GREEK ncg }, from {GREEK ncg }, I filch, whose radical consonants are the same as those of {GREEK ' cg }, I cover, I conceal. Thus, in these languages, the idea of a robber is that of a man who conceals, carries away, or diverts, in any manner whatever, a thing which does not belong to him.
The Hebrews expressed the same idea by the word gannab,—robber,—from the verb ganab, which means to put away, to turn aside: lo thi-gnob (Decalogue: Eighth Commandment), thou shalt not steal,—that is, thou shalt not hold back, thou shalt not put away any thing for thyself. That is the act of a man who, on entering into a society into which he agrees to bring all that he has, secretly reserves a portion, as did the celebrated disciple Ananias.
The etymology of the French verb voler is still more significant. Voler, or faire la vole (from the Latin vola, palm of the hand), means to take all the tricks in a game of ombre; so that le voleur, the robber, is the capitalist who takes all, who gets the lion's share. Probably this verb voler had its origin in the professional slang of thieves, whence it has passed into common use, and, consequently into the phraseology of the law.
Robbery is committed in a variety of ways, which have been very cleverly distinguished and classified by legislators according to their heinousness or merit, to the end that some robbers may be honored, while others are punished.
We rob,—1. By murder on the highway; 2. Alone, or in a band; 3. By breaking into buildings, or scaling walls; 4. By abstraction; 5. By fraudulent bankruptcy; 6. By forgery of the handwriting of public officials or private individuals; 7. By manufacture of counterfeit money.
This species includes all robbers who practise their profession with no
other aid than force and open fraud. Bandits, brigands, pirates, rovers
by land and sea,—these names were gloried in by the ancient heroes, who
thought their profession as noble as it was lucrative. Nimrod, Theseus,
Jason and his Argonauts; Jephthah, David, Cacus, Romulus, Clovis and
all his Merovingian descendants; Robert Guiscard, Tancred de Hauteville,
Bohemond, and most of the Norman heroes,—were brigands and robbers. The
heroic character of the robber is expressed in this line from Horace, in
reference to Achilles,—
"Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis," [27]and by this sentence from the dying words of Jacob (Gen. xlviii.), which
the Jews apply to David, and the Christians to their Christ: Manus ejus
contra omnes. In our day, the robber—the warrior of the ancients—is
pursued with the utmost vigor. His profession, in the language of the
code, entails ignominious and corporal penalties, from imprisonment to
the scaffold. A sad change in opinions here below!
We rob,—8. By cheating; 9. By swindling; 10. By abuse of trust; 11. By games and lotteries.