of things in which existence should cost no pain or self-denial at all. Emancipation provided that a man should work only for himself. It is very evident that many are enraged, and declare liberty all a delusion, because they had persuaded themselves that liberty meant emancipation from the need of working at all, or emancipation from all the hardships of the struggle for existence. Hence the denunciations of "wages slavery." But we have seen that liberty is not, and never can be, anything but an affair of social institutions, limited by their scope, and never reaching into any field of poetry or enthusiasm. It can never make toil cease to be painful or sacrifice cease to be irksome; it can never be enthroned above contracts as a regulator of the relations which are necessitated by the social organization, because it is on the same plane with contracts and exists only by and in connection with them. There could never have been any abolition of slavery and serfdom but by capital. The rise and development of capital have forced higher and more stringent organization; and this means new and in some respects more irksome restraints on individual liberty, in order to acquire greater power and win more ample sustenance for society. The socialist program consists in resolving that we demand the liberty we dreamed of and the easy security we used to have and all the new capital and wealth, while we declare that we will work only eight hours a day for it and will not study for it at all.
Does Labor Brutalize?
Those who live a hundred years from now will doubtless see strange results from a period in which men discuss their own position on earth not by facts but by
