to express and emphasize that
phenomenon--in which Henry George saw the historic law of
individualism--of the rich becoming richer while the poor become
poorer.[41]

Now it is evident that the smaller is the number of those who hold
possession of the land and the means of production the easier is their
expropriation--with or without indemnification--for the benefit of a
single proprietor which is and can be Society alone.

Land is the physical basis of the social organism. It is then absurd for
it to belong to a few and not to the whole social collectivity; it would
not be any more absurd for the air we breathe to be the monopoly of a
few _airlords_.

That (the socialization of the land and the means of production) is
truly the supreme goal of socialism, but evidently it can not be reached
by attacking such or such a landlord, or such or such a capitalist. The
individualist mode of conflict is destined to remain barren of results,
or, to say the least, it requires a terribly extravagant expenditure of
strength and efforts to obtain merely partial or provisional results.

And so those politicians, whose conception of statesmanship is a career
of daily, trivial protests, who see nothing in politics but a struggle
between individuals--and those tactics no longer produce any effect
either on the public or on legislative assemblies, because they have at
last become wonted to them--produce just about as much effect as would
fantastic champions of hygiene who should attempt to render a marsh
inhabitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with shots from a
revolver, instead of adopting as their method and their goal the
draining of the pestilential marsh.

No individual conflicts, no personal violence, but a Class Struggle. It
is necessary to make the immense army of workers of all trades and of
all professions conscious of these fundamental truths. It is necessary
to show them that their class interests are in opposition to the
interests of the class who possess the economic power, and that it is by
class-conscious organization that they will conquer this economic power
through the instrumentality of the other public powers that modern
civilization has assured to free peoples. It may, nevertheless, be
foreseen that, in every country, the ruling class, before yielding, will
abridge or destroy even these public liberties which were without danger
for them when they were in the hands of laborers not organized into a
class