conomy.

But this does not prevent a great many Socialist reformers from
remaining partisans of individual remuneration, and defending the old
citadel of wagedom, notwithstanding that it is being delivered over
stone by stone to the assailants by its former defenders.

They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work.

But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed
twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the
emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian
nobility before the liberation of the serfs? "Without the whip the Negro
will not work," said the anti-abolitionist. "Free from their master's
supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated," said the
Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789,
the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we
shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an
injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated
peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestors;
the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian
peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by
celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an
eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There,
where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for
it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to
the slaves themselves, they know what it is worth, as they know its
motive.

Moreover, who but the economists themselves taught us that while a
wage-earner's work is very often indifferent, an intense and productive
work is only obtained from a man who sees his wealth increase in
proportion to his efforts? All hymns sung in honour of private property
can be reduced to this axiom.

For it is remarkable that when economists, wishing to celebrate the
blessings of property, show us how an unproductive, marshy, or stony
soil is clothed with rich harvests when cultivated by the peasant
proprietor, they in nowise prove their thesis in favour of private
property. By admitting that the only guarantee not to be robbed of the
fruits of your labour is to possess the instruments of labour--which is
true--the economists only prove that man really produces most when he
works in freedom, when he has a certain choice in his occupations, when
he has no