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Passing to the other proposition of individuality, there has been, as all men know and no one will dispute, a most perceptible tendency of late years towards what is known as the array of one portion of the community the preponderating, voting portion against another the more ostentatious property-holding portion.
When such insanity prevails in the property-holding class, when it is so blinded by its momentary profit that it no longer has eyes for the most conspicuous signs of the times, surely all hope of a peaceful solution of the social question for England must be abandoned. The only possible solution is a violent revolution, which cannot fail to take place.
That these Unions contribute greatly to nourish the bitter hatred of the workers against the property-holding class need hardly be said. From them proceed, therefore, with or without the connivance of the leading members, in times of unusual excitement, individual actions which can be explained only by hatred wrought to the pitch of despair, by a wild passion overwhelming all restraints.
Down to the present hour, the property-holding class in Parliament still struggles against the better feelings of those not yet fallen a prey to egotism, and seeks to subjugate the proletariat still further. One piece of common land after another is appropriated and placed under cultivation, a process by which the general cultivation is furthered, but the proletariat greatly injured.
"There is nothing more to hope from the property-holding classes." "The bourgeois reformers are constantly getting less progressive and allying themselves more and more with the reactionaries." "It is impossible that the capitalists should accomplish any important reform." "With all social reform, short of Socialism itself, conditions cannot be permanently improved."
I came, Sir, from the tyranny of the Old World, when but a lad, and landed upon the American shores, having left my kindred and native land in pursuit of some place where men of toil would not be crushed by the property-holding class.
While bemoaning the demoralisation of the lower classes, they are blind to the element of progress in this dissolution of the old social order, and refuse to acknowledge that the corruption wrought by private interests and hypocrisy in the property-holding class is much greater.
The February days contemplated originally a reform of the suffrage laws, whereby the area of the politically privileged among the property-holding class was to be extended, while the exclusive rule of the aristocracy of finance was to be overthrown.
In other words, the worker is, in law and in fact, the slave of the property-holding class, so effectually a slave that he is sold like a piece of goods, rises and falls in value like a commodity. If the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their price falls.
Fitzralph had the sympathy not only of the seculars, but of the "possessioners," or property-holding monks. See his De Pauperie Salvatoris, lib. i.-iv., printed by R.L. Poole, as appendix to Wycliffe, De Dominio Divino.
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