nciple. But they
cannot yet throw aside the idea of "wounding first and healing
afterwards"!

Thus, after having denied Communism, after having laughed at their ease
at the formula--"To each according to his needs"--these great economists
discover that they have forgotten something, the needs of the producers,
which they now admit. Only it is for the State to estimate them, for the
State to verify if the needs are not disproportionate to the work.

The State will dole out charity. Thence to the English poor-law and the
workhouse is but a step.

There is but a slight difference, because even this stepmother of a
society against whom we are in revolt has also been compelled to
_temper_ her individualist principles; she, too, has had to make
concessions in a communist direction and under the same form of charity.

She, too, distributes halfpenny dinners to prevent the pillaging of her
shops; builds hospitals--often very bad ones, but sometimes splendid
ones--to prevent the ravages of contagious diseases. She, too, after
having paid the hours of labour, shelters the children of those she has
wrecked. She takes their needs into consideration and doles out charity.

Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was
poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating
"surplus value," of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently
destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger.
It was poverty that made capitalists. And if the number of the poor
increased so rapidly during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions
and wars that followed the founding of States, and to the increase of
riches resulting from the exploitation of the East. These two causes
tore asunder the bonds that kept men together in the agrarian and urban
communities, and taught them to proclaim the principle of _wages_, so
dear to the exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly
practiced in their tribal life.

And it is this principle that is to spring from a revolution which men
dare to call by the name of Social Revolution,--a name so dear to the
starved, the oppressed, and the sufferers!

It can never be. For the day on which old institutions will fall under
the proletarian axe, voices will cry out: "Bread, shelter, ease for
all!" And those voices will be listened to; the people will say: "Let us
begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that
we