of another
quarter, if not of the half, has no better results than the amusement of
the rich or the exploitation of the public.

Thus, if we consider on the one hand the rapidity with which civilized
nations augment their powers of production, and on the other hand the
limits set to that production, be it directly or indirectly, by existing
conditions, we cannot but conclude that an economic system a trifle more
reasonable would permit them to heap up in a few years so many useful
products that they would be constrained to say--"Enough! We have enough
coal and bread and raiment! Let us rest and consider how best to use our
powers, how best to employ our leisure."

No, plenty for all is not a dream--though it was a dream indeed in those
days when man, for all his pains, could hardly win a few bushels of
wheat from an acre of land, and had to fashion by hand all the
implements he used in agriculture and industry. Now it is no longer a
dream, because man has invented a motor which, with a little iron and a
few sacks of coal, gives him the mastery of a creature strong and docile
as a horse, and capable of setting the most complicated machinery in
motion.

But, if plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense
capital--cities, houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways,
education--must cease to be regarded as private property, for the
monopolist to dispose of at his pleasure.

This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by
our ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective
interests of men may gain from it the greatest good for all.

There must be EXPROPRIATION. The well-being of all--the end;
expropriation--the means.

II

Expropriation, such then is the problem which History has put before the
men of the twentieth century: the return to Communism in all that
ministers to the well-being of man.

But this problem cannot be solved by means of legislation. No one
imagines that. The poor, as well as the rich, understand that neither
the existing Governments, nor any which might arise out of possible
political changes, would be capable of finding such a solution. They
feel the necessity of a social revolution; and both rich and poor
recognize that this revolution is imminent, that it may break out in a
few years.

A great change in thought has taken place during the last half of the
nineteenth century; but suppressed, as it was, by the propertied
classes, and d