Page:Adolph Douai - Better Times (1877).djvu/29

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are employed) all the necessaries and enough of the accustomed luxuries for everybody. Well then, why should the really deserving people, the creators of wealth, work from ten to twelve or more hours a day, especially when millions are out of employment, for the sole benefit of the undeserving speculators? Let us work eight hours, every one of us, and devote the proceeds of the two superfluous hours to the accumulation of capital, that is to say, to the increase of our means of labor; and when four hours a day will be as productive as six are now, let us work six, and so on to continue increasing our investment of common capital.

A common investment of capital, to the exclusion of all private capital—that is the prophetic cry of History. Our party has been (reproachfully) called the Communistic party. We do not indignantly repudiate that name, it is in our view no title of reproach, but rather an honorable name. But we indignantly throw the calumnies which our opponents connect with it, back into their faces. They play the contemptible old "stop thief" trick. It is not the robbed who need protest their innocence, as against their robbers. Honest laborers need not plead Not Guilty when they are charged with thievish propensities by life-long usurers, profit-mongers, and sharks.

Aye, all means of labor to be common property of the people, while the full proceeds of labor are to be private property. The laborer to be indeed, for the first time within many centuries, worthy of his full hire. Everbody to be at fullest liberty to choose a calling, to enter one of the National Trades Unions, which all and each govern themselves, and are governed by a compromise with all others and with the state, the latter leasing out under specified contracts the means of labor to the Trades Unions. The State or Nation to be really Democratic, since no law can be passed but which was first compromised with the advisory body or the Parliament of all the Trades Unions. Every citizen to be twice represented, once as a citizen in the Government, once as a worker, with his special interest in his Trade Union. No interest to be unrepresented, and all compelled to peaceably devise bills for the common and most equitable interest of all, and the Government to be unable to do great wrongs and to inflict great evils, but to be able to hear and carry out the wisest advice of all conflicting interests which must be harmonized by the Trades Unions. A Government, therefore, which is just as progressive as the march of Science and Education can demand, and just as stable as the Economical wants of each age will enforce. All the Nations which have been organized on the same basis, to