t, cause any decrease of his
estate and he can always draw from the inexhaustible multitude of
laborers who are forced by lack of employment to offer themselves on the
market.

That is why--not because present-day proprietors are more wicked than
those of former times, but because even the moral sentiments are the
result of economic conditions--the landed proprietor or the
superintendent of his estate hastens to have a veterinary called if, in
his stable, a cow becomes ill, while he is in no hurry to have a doctor
called if it is the son of the cow-herd who is attacked by disease.

Certainly there may be--and these are more or less frequent
exceptions--here and there a proprietor who contradicts this rule,
especially when he lives in daily contact with his laborers. Neither can
it be denied that the rich classes are moved at times by the spirit of
benevolence--even apart from the _charity fad_--and that they thus put
to rest the inner voice, the symptom of the moral disease from which
they suffer, but the inexorable rule is nevertheless as follows: with
the modern form of industry the laborer has gained political liberty,
the right of suffrage, of association, etc. (rights which he is allowed
to use only when he does not utilize them to form a class-party, based
on intelligent apprehension of the essential point of the social
question), but he has lost the guarantee of daily bread and of a home.

Socialism wishes to give this guarantee to all individuals--and it
demonstrates the mathematical possibility of this by the substitution of
social ownership for individual ownership of the means of
production--but it does not follow from this that socialism will do away
with all the useful and truly fruitful conquests of the present phase of
civilization, and of the preceding phases.

And here is a characteristic example of this: the invention of
industrial and agricultural machinery, that marvelous application of
science to the transformation of natural forces which ought to have had
only beneficent consequences, has caused and is still causing the misery
and ruin of thousands and thousands of laborers. The substitution of
machines for human labor has inevitably condemned multitudes of workers
to the tortures of enforced idleness and to the ruthless action of the
iron law of minimum wages barely sufficient to prevent them from dying
of hunger.

The first instinctive reaction or impulse of these unfortunates was and
still