about a hundred
pages altogether. These will give you a fairly clear notion of the
matter. I shall not mention the hard, scientific name of this
philosophy again. I don't like big words if little ones will serve.

If you enjoy reading a good story, a novel that is full of romance and
adventure, I would advise you to read _Before Adam_, by Jack London, a
Socialist writer. It is a novel, but it is also a work of science. He
gives an account of the life of the first men and shows how their
whole existence depended upon the crude weapons and tools, sticks
picked up in the forests, which they used. They couldn't live
differently than they did, because they had no other means of getting
a living. How a people make their living determines how they live.

For many thousands of years, the scientists tell us, men lived in the
world without owning any private property. That came into existence
when men saw that one man could produce more out of the soil than he
needed to eat himself. Then, when they went out to war with other
tribes, the members of a tribe instead of trying to kill their
enemies, made them captives and used them as slaves. They did not
cease killing their foes from humane motives, because they had grown
better men, but because it was more profitable.

From our point of view, slavery is a bad thing, but when it first
came into existence it was a step upward and onward. If we take the
history of slave societies and nations we shall soon find that their
laws, their customs and their institutions were based upon the mode of
producing wealth through the labor of slaves. There were two classes
into which society was divided, a class of masters and a class of
slaves.

When slavery broke down and gave way to feudalism there were new ways
of producing wealth. The laws of feudal societies, their customs and
institutions, changed to meet the needs brought about through the new
methods of making things. Under slavery, the slaves made wealth for
their masters and were doled out food enough to keep them alive. The
slave had no rights. Under feudalism, the serfs produced wealth for
the lords parts of the time, working for themselves the rest of the
time. They had some rights. The bounds of freedom were widened. Under
neither of these systems was there a regular system of paying wages in
money, such as we have to-day. The slave gave up all his product and
took what the master was pleased to give him in the way of food,
cloth