— 17 —
instead of preparing and inviting all to enjoy them? Is it not enough that unjust laws give a few the power which lies in private riches, for political rule; must also the great and only redeeming and liberating power which exists in the human treasure of knowledge and_ skill, be made a tool for the rich to wield it for the debasement and subjection of the working classes? Is it not the worst kind of robbery to measure out a better kind of education to the upper-ten thousand, a worse one to the millions of workers? to enable by patent laws the capitalists to swallow up almost all the benefits accruing from inventions and discoveries, instead of rewarding the inventors and discoverers, and at once publishing their new schemes? to force, by a network of legal circumstances, the Scientists and artists into the service of private capital, instead of employing them for the furtherance of universal Co-operation among workers?
And not even in minor matters does our legislation protect labor from the robbery of capital. There is no lien law for unpaid wages, no law against the truck-system, no law against contract labor in our prisons; no law forbidding unsafe scaffolding in building operations; no law for the industrial education of apprentices; no law providing for the sanitary inspection and regulation of factories, mines, and conveyances (except in one or two places) and of workingmen's dwellings, etc., etc.
This is the gratitude of Capital toward its producers and protectors! Already Adam Smith, the first of all Political Economists, has confessed to us the truth that labor is the only source of all wealth, that capital will never produce anything without labor, and that it could not for a moment continue to exist without the protection which the great body of workers give it by their voluntary respect for the laws. No standing army and no police force, however numerous, could ever repress a majority of laborers who are smarting under the sufferings and indignities inflicted on them by capital, and prevent them from forcibly destroying its privileges or abuses, and from helping themselves to what they need. If those privileges and abuses are respected for the time being and attacked only in a lawful way, it is but the good sense and the wonderful patience of the workers which is the cause of the security and, therefore, of the high value of private property. It is not so very long ago that the Barn-burners in the state of New York destroyed by force the great feudal properties and privileges which had, by the English government, been conferred upon a few wealthy monopolists; and their deeds of violence were justified by great lawyers, and finally sanctioned by law. The revolutionary heroes of American history broke a great many of
