derived; the sons and daughters are
being robbed over and over again and again, year after year, in order
that the property may continue to yield this income to us.

We therefore paid nothing of our own for this bond. What we gave for it
was of the spoils which the great robber, capitalism, has bestowed upon
us, its favorite children, from what it has taken from its unfortunate
victims.

The same persons or their children and successors were or shall be
robbed first to create our property, then to pay the income of it, next
to buy the bond, and now they are being robbed to meet the interest on
it and finally they will be robbed to pay its face value. If capitalism
stands, of course the victims of the last of these robberies will
belong, probably, to a remote generation; but this delay is a misfortune
in store for many of all intervening generations.

If the robbery connected with this bond were limited to its original
cost, one thousand dollars, and to its accruing interest, which is
likely in time to aggregate several thousand dollars, it would indeed
be bad enough, yet not nearly as much so as it is under the melancholy
circumstances; for the money paid on account of the bond goes towards
killing or wrecking its producers, if not those who produced this
particular thousand dollars, yet others of their class to whom the world
owes all of its wealth; therefore the thousand dollars which went into
this bond has been devoted to the robbery of those who were robbed of it
and of the most precious of all things: life and limb.

You will ask: how can you and Mrs Brown, in the face of your theory,
according to which all who live by owning are robbers of those who live
by working, consistently receive and expend the income of your
inheritance?

The answer was given to a friend who asked us why we did not follow the
heroic example of a young American who had recently renounced what had
been inherited by him, and this is, in effect, what we said:

As we look at the question, our course is more rational than his,
because the wealth which he renounces may go to some one who is without
his sympathy for the proletariat. We prefer to receive our inheritance
and use it to overthrow the economic system which makes it possible for
us to do nothing and have everything, and for those who do everything to
have nothing.

Capitalists, as such, people who live by the owning of the machines of
production and distribution, instead of by