vile multitude," "canaille," "people." In
keeping therewith, all that the State has done in the name of Society
for the "public weal" has always been to the advantage and profit of the
ruling class. It is in its interests that laws are framed. "_Salus
reipublicae suprema lex esto_" (Let the public weal be the supreme law)
is a well known legal principle of Old Rome. But who constituted the
Roman Commonwealth? Did it consist of the subjugated peoples, the
millions of slaves? No. A disproportionately small number of Roman
citizens, foremost among these the Roman nobility, all of whom were
supported by the subject class.

When, in the Middle Ages, noblemen and Princes stole the common
property, they did so "according to law," in the "interest of the public
weal," and how drastically the common property and that of the helpless
peasants was treated on the occasion we have sufficiently explained. The
agrarian history of the last fifteen centuries is a narration of
uninterrupted robbery perpetrated upon common and peasant property by
the nobility and the Church in all the leading countries of Europe. When
the French Revolution expropriated the estates of the nobility and the
Church, it did so "in the name of the public weal"; and a large part of
the seven million of landed estates, that are to-day the prop of modern
bourgeois France, owe their existence to this expropriation. "In the
name of the public weal," Spain more than once embargoed Church
property, and Italy wholly confiscated the same,--both with the plaudits
of the zealous defenders of "sacred property." The English nobility has
for centuries been robbing the Irish and English people of their
property, and, during the period of 1804-1832 made itself a present of
not less than 3,511,710 acres of commons "in the interest of the public
welfare." When during the great North American war for the emancipation
of the negro, millions of slaves, the regular property of their masters,
were declared free without indemnity to the latter, the thing was done
"in the name of the public weal." Our whole capitalist development is an
uninterrupted process of expropriation and confiscation, at which the
manufacturer expropriates the workingman, the large landlord
expropriates the peasant, the large merchant expropriates the small
dealer, and finally one capitalist expropriates another, i. e., the
larger expropriates and absorbs the smaller. To hear our bourgeoisie,
all this happens in