"The case is entirely similar as regards the distinctions in respect of property within the body of commoners.
"That the capitalist gentleman in his chamber takes pleasure in the high degree of comfort and the great advantage which large wealth confers upon its possessor,—nothing can be more natural, simpler or more legitimate than that he should do so."
Incidentally, then, Gentlemen, so far am I in this pamphlet from instigating the unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of the wealthy, that, on the contrary, I expressly declare myself for the legitimacy of such property. I explicitly declare that the satisfaction taken in the advantages and amenities which flow from such wealth are the most natural and legitimate things in the world.
Let me now go on with the definition referred to:
"The workingmen and the lower middle class, that is to say the class without capital, may be wholly justified in demanding that those by whose hands all that wealth which is the pride of our civilization is produced, whose hands have brought forth all these products without which society could not live for a single day—it may well be demanded that these should be secured an ample and unfailing income, and thereby be given an opportunity for some intellectual development, and that they be by this means put in the way of a truly human manner of life. But, while I am free to say that the working classes are fairly within their rights in making these demands of the State, and to stand out stiffly for their demands as being the essential purpose for which the State exists, yet the workingman must never allow himself to forget that all property that has once been acquired and is legally held must be considered lawful and inviolable."
Such, then, is the manner and degree of my instigation of the unpropertied class to hatred and distrust that I incontinently preach to them the inviolability and sacredness of all property acquired by the wealthy classes, and exhort them to respect it.
But I go on to say:
"In case the man of means is not content with the material amenities of large wealth, but insists that possession of wealth, of capital, be made the basis of a control to be exercised over the State, a condition of participation in the direction of public policy and of the direction of public affairs, then and only then does the man of means become a bourgeois; then does he make the fact of property a legal ground of political power; then does he stand forth as representative of a privileged class aiming to put the imprint of its prerogative upon all social features and institutions, just as truly as the nobility of the Middle Ages did with respect to the basis of their privilege, landed property."
Accordingly, in my use of the term, as I have explicitly and painstakingly defined it, the man of means, the man of the upper-middle class, is a bourgeois in case he proceeds to set up the essentially harmless and inoffensive fact of his large property as a legal condition of participation in the direction of public affairs; in short, when he proceeds to set up the ownership of capital as a legal and political prerogative, and so abolishes the equality of the propertied and the unpropertied classes before the law, and thereby infringes upon the liberty and further growth of the people, in the interest of accumulated wealth and continued upper-class mastery. Only under these circumstances, as I particularly point out, does the bourgeoisie become a privileged class, which it otherwise, in spite of all inequality of wealth, is not.
In my pamphlet I point out how all this has its effect through the census rating whereby admission to a share in the direction of public policy, through eligibility to any legislative body, is so limited by property qualifications as to make the possession of capital a prerequisite. I point out further that this effect follows equally whether the property qualification is open and above-board or under-hand, and finally that the existing three-class system of elections, dating back to 1849, amounts to such an under-hand, disguised property rating.