“I have another proposition. I think when a man has passed five years in the service of a corporation, though he may not have bought a dollar of its stock, he is in a certain sense a stockholder. He has put his labor and persistency there, and I think every man who has been employed in a corporation for a year or two should have a voice in its financial management. In Japan, when a man dies, his land is left to the state. Do you not think that is a wiser plan than ours? The land becomes more valuable through the labor of the whole country, and not by that of the man who eats off of it.
Our great hope in the future is in the education of the masses, for they will yet be our rulers. New York stood aghast at the defalcation of millions of dollars, but will you submit to be robbed of hundreds of millions by monopolists? Fifth Avenue cannot afford to let the Five Points exist. You cannot get wealth enough to fortify you against discontented ignorance within your reach. The lesson taught by Chicago is that wealth cannot afford to neglect poverty.”
How the matter would be adjusted if two or more men should happen to insist on occupying the same house and lot we do not know. They would all have an equal right, or one would have as good a right to it as another, and, there being no authority, no law, and none of them having any moral or religious principle, they would most likely, all having the pride and obstinacy natural to the human heart, be obliged to settle the question by fighting it out, and leaving the house and lot as the prize to the victor. Might or craft would then settle the right. Society and mankind would fall back into a state of war, in which might is the only rule of right, and which Hobbes contends was their natural state, out of which they were happy to get by the surrender of all their natural rights or natural liberty to any one who would consent to be their king, and in return would maintain them in a state of peace.
The Paris Commune, endorsed by Mr. Phillips, and which was led on and approved by the Internationals, tells us not only the principles of the Association, but its method of carrying them out and reducing them to practice. We cite here a passage from The Dublin Review on the principles and spirit of the Commune:
“M. Auguste Desmoulins is one of those fanatical believers in the infallibility of the unknown, to whom the past is all superstition, the present all corruption, and the future the one reality of
life. He is inaccessible to conviction either in the way of holy water or the way of petroleum; and with him, as with all those of his school, the mind has become so far softened that the terminology which has hitherto served not merely among Christians and Jews, but among such heathens as the Greeks and Romans, the Turks, the Indians, the Red Indians, to distinguish between right and wrong, has ceased to convey a meaning. The world is not a mere Babel of tongues nowadays: it is, outside the church, a far worse Babel of thought. In the following passage, which really sums up the argument of his paper in a sufficiently trenchant and complete form, M. Desmoulins does not hesitate to convey his opinion that the coveting of one’s neighbor’s goods is suggested by, or at least connected with, a sentiment of justice; that the daily bread earned by labor is much more keenly enjoyed by a man who does not believe in God, or heaven, or hell; and that as neither the French workman nor his master believes in a future state, it is only natural and quite right that the workman should heal the difference between them here by robbery:
“‘The Parisian workman is often obliged to visit the handsome quarters of the town, while new buildings are ever thrusting him further away beyond the old barriers into vile habitations. In this condition, which is made for him. anything helps to irritate him. How can he find content in a home that is narrow, ill-lighted, foul, nearly without air, when he compares this wretched hole, for which he pays so dear, with the sumptuous chambers that he has either built or decorated in the rich quarters? It is easy to denounce in eloquent homilies the spirit of envy that devours the lower classes. We should recognize that a true notion of justice mixes with the feeling.
“‘The desire to enjoy the fruits of his labor is especially likely to spring up in the mind of the French workman, who does not believe, any more than his master, in the reparations of a future life; who does not perceive for the right of the master any other sanction than the material fact of possession; and whom, besides, universal suffrage invests with a share of sovereignty equal to that of the capitalist. Whatever may be said by those who have been justly called mammonite writers, we can easily understand that the proletary who has just given his vote finds it hard to resign himself to social serfage at the very moment when he feels himself politically sovereign. This striking contrast between his rights as citizen and his condition of pariah in society, accompanies him everywhere, reproduces itself in every act of his life, and adds a perpetual gloom to exhausting labor and never-abating privations.’
“This passage contains the essence of
M. Desmoulins’ apology for the Commune; and it supplies, we submit, matter for reflection in its every line. The statesmen and the classes in society who delight in seeing the influence of religion weakened or destroyed, never seem to realize until it is too late that they are sure to be the especial victims of their own success. The great truths of life hang together and sustain each other: