The freer and more highly developed trade and industry are in any place, "the more complete is the demoralization of the privileged few on the one hand, and the greater are the misery, the complaints, and the just indignation of the laboring masses on the other. England, Belgium, France, Germany, are certainly the countries of Europe in which trade and industry enjoy greatest freedom and have made most progress. In these very countries the most cruel pauperism prevails, the gulf between capitalists and landlords on the one hand and the laboring class on the other is greater than in any other country. In Russia, in the Scandinavian countries, in Italy, in Spain, where trade and industry are still embryonic, people but seldom die of hunger except on extraordinary occasions. In England starvation is an every-day thing. And not only individuals starve, but thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands."[390]
3. But mankind will soon have passed the low stage of evolution to which private property belongs.
As there has at all times been oppression of the nations by the State, so has there also always been "exploitation of the masses of slaves, serfs, wage-workers, by a ruling minority."[391] But this exploitation is no more "inseparably united with the existence of human society"[392] than is that oppression. "By the force of things themselves"[393] unlimited private property will be done away. Everybody feels already that this moment is approaching,[394] the transformation is already at hand,[395] it is to be expected within the nineteenth century.[396]
II. _In the next stage of evolution, which mankind must speedily reach, property will be so constituted that there will indeed be private property in the objects of consumption, but in land, instruments of labor, and all other capital, there will be only social property. The future society will be collectivist._
In this way every laborer has the product of his labor guaranteed to him.
1. "Justice must serve as basis for the new world: without it, no liberty, no living together, no prosperity, no peace."[397] "Justice, not that of jurists, nor yet that of theologians, nor yet that of metaphysicians, but simple human justice, commands"[398] that "in future every man's enjoyment corresponds to the quantity of goods produced by him."[399] The thing is, then, to find a means "which makes it impossible for any one, whoever he may be, to exploit the labor of another, and permits each to share in the enjoyment of society's stock of goods (which is solely a product of labor) only so far as he has, by his labor, directly contributed to the production of this stock of goods."[400]