This is, as we have seen, precisely Ward’s idea of what constitutes the substance of civilization.
“Man, to be sure,” says Dietzgen, “is still dependent on nature. Her tribulations are not yet all overcome. Culture has yet a good deal to do; aye, its work is endless. But we have so far mastered the dragon, that we finally succeeded in forging the weapon with which it can be subdued; we know the way to tame the beast into a useful domestic animal.”
What is this “weapon” which humanity has forged and which constitutes the possibility of its salvation? “This salvation,” says Dietzgen, “was neither invented nor revealed, it has grown of the accumulated labor of history. It consists in the wealth of to-day which arose glorious and dazzling in the light of science, out of human flesh and blood, to save humanity. This wealth in all its palpable reality, is the solid foundation of the hope of social-democracy.”
And here lest there should seem to be a plain contradiction between Dietzgen and Ward, we will go further and see that Dietzgen, like Ward, does not mean merely those items of wealth which happen to be in existence in the shape of tangible commodities.
“The wealth of to-day does not consist in the superb mansions, inhabited by the privileged of society, nor does it consist in their costly apparel, or in the gold and precious stones of their jewelry, or in the heaps of goods peeping through the show windows of our great cities. All that as well as the coin and bullion in the trunks and safes form but an appendix or, so to speak, the tassels and tufts, behind which is concealed that great and real wealth--the rock on which our hope is built.
“What authorizes the people to believe in the salvation from long ages of torture--nay, not only to believe in, but to see it, and actively strive for, is the fairy-like productive power, the prodigious fertility of human labor. In the secrets which have been wrung from nature; in the magic formulas by which we force her to do our wishes and to yield her bounties almost without any painful work on our part; in the constantly increasing improvement of the methods of production--in this I say consists the wealth which can accomplish what no redeemer ever could.”