an fish and eggs endure for
ever); and ye have divided it unjustly; also ye have said that my
reproach to you for having the poor always with you was a law unto you
that this evil should persist and stink in the nostrils of God to all
eternity; wherefore I think that Lazarus will yet see you beside Dives
in hell." Modern Capitalism has made short work of the primitive pleas
for inequality. The Pharisees themselves have organized communism in
capital. Joint stock is the order of the day. An attempt to return
to individual properties as the basis of our production would smash
civilization more completely than ten revolutions. You cannot get the
fields tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator. Take
the shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to you the
particular length of rail, the particular seat in the railway carriage,
the particular lever in the engine that is his very own and nobody
else's; and he will shun you as a madman, very wisely. And if, like
Ananias and Sapphira, you try to hold back your little shop or what not
from the common stock, represented by the Trust, or Combine, or Kartel,
the Trust will presently freeze you out and rope you in and finally
strike you dead industrially as thoroughly as St. Peter himself. There
is no longer any practical question open as to Communism in production:
the struggle today is over the distribution of the product: that is,
over the daily dividing-up which is the first necessity of organized
society.

REDISTRIBUTION.

Now it needs no Christ to convince anybody today that our system of
distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have million-dollar
babies side by side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted
drudgery. One person in every five dies in a workhouse, a public
hospital, or a madhouse. In cities like London the proportion is very
nearly one in two. Naturally so outrageous a distribution has to be
effected by violence pure and simple. If you demur, you are sold up. If
you resist the selling up you are bludgeoned and imprisoned, the process
being euphemistically called the maintenance of law and order. Iniquity
can go no further. By this time nobody who knows the figures of the
distribution defends them. The most bigoted British Conservative
hesitates to say that his king should be much poorer than Mr.
Rockefeller, or to proclaim the moral superiority of prostitution to
needlework on the ground that it pays better. The ne