Here we are at the end of our drama.

We met a worker at the market one day, come to sell his labor power, and we saw him negotiate as equals with the money-owner. His still didn’t know how hard the Calvary road would be that he had to climb, not yet had the most bitter cup approached his lips, all of which had to be gulped down to the last dregs. The money-owner, not yet become a capitalist, was nothing more than a modest owner of a little wealth, timid and uncertain of the success of his new enterprise, in which he was investing his fortune.

We the saw how the scene came to change.

The worker, after having generated, with his first overwork, capital, was oppressed by the excessive labor of an extraordinarily prolonged day. With relative surplus value the labor time necessary for his maintenance was restricted and that of overwork prolonged, destined to always nourish capital more richly. In simple cooperation we saw the worker in a stationary discipline, and, dragged by a current made of a linking of labor powers, exhausted evermore, by giving greater nutrition to ever-growing capital. We saw the worker mutilated, crestfallen, and depressed to the greatest degree by the division of labor, in manufacturing. We saw him suffering unspeakable material and moral pains, created for him by the introduction of machinery, in modern industry. Expropriated of the last bit of artisan virtue, we saw him reduced to a mere servant of the machine, transformed, from a member of a living organism, into the most vulgar appendage of a mechanism, tortured by labor dramatically increased by the machine, which at every stretch threatens to tear off a shred of his flesh, or to grind him completely between its terrible gears; and what’s more we saw his wife and tender children become slaves of capital. And in the meantime the capitalist, immensely enriched, pays him a salary, which he is able to lessen at his pleasure, even making a show of keeping it at the same level as before, and even of increasing it. Finally we saw the worker, made temporarily useless by the accumulation of capital, passing from the active industrial army into the reserves, from then on, from this, falling forever into the hell of pauperism. All the sacrifice is consummated!

But however was all of this able to happen?

In a very simple way. The worker was, it’s true, the owner of his labor power, with which he would have been able to produce much more than he needed for himself and his family every day, but he was lacking however the other indispensable elements of labor, that is, the means of production and raw materials. Devoid therefore of any wealth, the worker was forced, in order to live his life, to sell his only good, his labor power to the money-owner, who made it his property. Private property and the wage-worker, foundations of the system of capitalist production, were the foremost cause of so much pain.

But that is unfair! It’s wicked! And whosoever granted man the right of private property? And however did the money-owner find himself in possession of a primitive accumulation, origin of many infamies?

A terrible voice comes forth from the temple of the God of Capital, and shouts: “All is right, because all is written in the book of eternal laws. Already a very distant time arose, in which all humans still roamed free and equal throughout the Earth. Few of these were laborious, sober and economical; all of the others idlers, revelers and squanderers. Virtue made the first rich, and vice impoverished the second. The few had the right to enjoy (these and their descendants) of the virtuously accumulated wealth; while the many pushed by their misery to sell themselves to the rich, were condemned to serve those and their descendants eternally.”

Here is how certain friends of the bourgeois order explain the matter. “Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defense of property. M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so spirituel” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 26).

If such were the origin of primitive accumulation, the theory, which derives from it, that of original sin and of predestination, would be so just. The father was an idler and a reveler, the son will suffer the misery. Such is the son of a rich man, he is predestined to be happy, powerful, learned, civil, strong, etc.; such is the other son of a poor man, he is predestined to be unhappy, weak, ignorant, brutish, immoral, etc. A society, founded upon such a law, would certainly have to end, as so many other societies already ended, less barbarous and less hypocritical, so many religions and gods, starting from Christianity, in whose laws one finds similar examples of justice.

And here we could put an end to our say, if we were allowed to end it with this bourgeois foolishness. But our drama has a catastrophe worthy of it, as we will soon see, witnessing its final act.

We begin the story, that history written by the bourgeoisie, and for the use and consumption of the bourgeoisie; we search in it for the origin of primitive accumulation, and it’s here that we find it.

In the most ancient age, flocks of nomadic people came to establish themselves in those places better disposed and more favored by nature. They founded cities, they devoted themselves to cultivating the land, and to doing so many other necessary things for their own wellbeing. But is here that they encounter and collide with each other in their development, and war follows, deaths, fires, robberies and massacres. All that belongs to vanquished becomes property of the victors, including the persons who survived, who are all made slaves.

Here is the origin of primitive accumulation in antiquity. Let’s come now to the Middle Ages.

In this second age of history, we find nothing other than invasions of people into countries of other people, richer and more favored by nature, and always the same refrain of massacres, robberies, fires, etc. All that belongs to the vanquished becomes property of the victors, with the sole difference being that the survivors no longer become slaves, like in the ancient age, but serfs, and they pass with the land, to which they are joined, into the power of their lords. Therefore not even in the Middle Ages do we find the slightest trace of the idyllic laboriousness, sobriety and parsimoniousness praised by a certain bourgeois doctrine as the origin of primitive accumulation. And notice that the Middle Ages is the age to which our most illustrious owners of wealth are able to brag about tracing their origins. But let’s come finally to the modern age.

The bourgeois revolution has destroyed feudalism, and has transmuted servitude into wage-work. At the same time, however, it has taken away from the worker the few means of existence, which the state of servitude used to ensure for them. The serf, although he had to labor for the greater part of his time for his lord, also had a piece of land with the means and the time to cultivate it/to live his life. The bourgeoisie has destroyed all of that, and from the serf has made a free (?) worker, who has no other choice, either be exploited in the way that we already saw, by the first capitalist who happens upon him, or die of hunger.

Let’s now get down to the particulars. Let’s begin the story of a populace, and let’s see how the expropriation of agricultural populations came to be, and the formation of the working masses, destined to provide their labor power to modern industries. We will take, as usual, the story of England, because if England is the country, where the disease that we are studying is more developed than elsewhere, it is given that it will always be able to offer us the most suitable scope for our practical observations.

“In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14^th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15^th century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden. In the larger seignorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage laborers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilized their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage laborers, relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same time peasant farmers, since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, &c. …

“The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15^th, and the first decade of the 16^th century. A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labor market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, ‘everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.’ Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his ‘Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles,’ describes how the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country. ‘What care our great encroachers?’ The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the laborers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. ‘If,’ says Harrison, ‘the old records of euerie manour be sought... it will soon appear that in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk... that England was neuer less furnished with people than at the present... Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in them... I could saie somewhat …’

“The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16^th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favorites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. ‘Pauper ubique jacet,’ cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England. In the 43^rd year of her reign the nation was obliged to recognize pauperism officially by the introduction of a poor-rate. ‘The authors of this law seem to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for [contrary to traditional usage] it has no preamble whatever.’ By the 16^th of Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared perpetual, and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 27).

“In the south of England certain landed proprietors and well-to-do farmers put their heads together and propounded ten questions as to the right interpretation of the poor-law of Elizabeth. These they laid before a celebrated jurist of that time, Sergeant Snigge (later a judge under James I.) for his opinion. ‘Question 9 — Some of the more wealthy farmers in the parish have devised a skillful mode by which all the trouble of executing this Act (the 43^rd of Elizabeth) might be avoided. They have proposed that we shall erect a prison in the parish, and then give notice to the neighborhood, that if any persons are disposed to farm the poor of this parish, they do give in sealed proposals, on a certain day, of the lowest price at which they will take them off our hands; and that they will be authorized to refuse to any one unless he be shut up in the aforesaid prison. The proposers of this plan conceive that there will be found in the adjoining counties, persons, who, being unwilling to labor and not possessing substance or credit to take a farm or ship, so as to live without labor, may be induced to make a very advantageous offer to the parish. If any of the poor perish under the contractor’s care, the sin will lie at his door, as the parish will have done its duty by them. We are, however, apprehensive that the present Act (43^rd of Elizabeth) will not warrant a prudential measure of this kind; but you are to learn that the rest of the freeholders of the county, and of the adjoining county of B, will very readily join in instructing their members to propose an Act to enable the parish to contract with a person to lock up and work the poor; and to declare that if any person shall refuse to be so locked up and worked, he shall be entitled to no relief. This, it is hoped, will prevent persons in distress from wanting relief, and be the means of keeping down parishes’” (Marx, Capital, vol.1, ch. 27, fn. 9).

“The advance made by the 18^th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make use of their little independent methods as well. The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a ‘general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of Commons’ (admitting thereby that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor…

“‘In Northamptonshire and Leicestershire,’ [says Addington,] ‘the enclosure of common lands has taken place on a very large scale, and most of the new lordships, resulting from the enclosure, have been turned into pasturage, in consequence of which many lordships have not now 50 acres plowed yearly, in which 1,500 were plowed formerly. The ruins of former dwelling-houses, barns, stables, &c.,’ are the sole traces of the former inhabitants. ‘An hundred houses and families have in some open-field villages dwindled to eight or ten.... The landholders in most parishes that have been enclosed only 15 or 20 years, are very few in comparison of the numbers who occupied them in their open-field state. It is no uncommon thing for 4 or 5 wealthy graziers to engross a large enclosed lordship which was before in the hands of 20 or 30 farmers, and as many smaller tenants and proprietors. All these are hereby thrown out of their livings with their families and many other families who were chiefly employed and supported by them.’ It was not only the land that lay waste, but often land cultivated either in common or held under a definite rent paid to the community, that was annexed by the neighboring landlords under pretext of enclosure…’

“‘When,’ says Dr. Price, ‘this land gets into the hands of a few great farmers, the consequence must be that the little farmers” (earlier designated by him ‘a multitude of little proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and families by the produce of the ground they occupy by sheep kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, &c., and who therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence’) ‘will be converted into a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will be under a necessity of going to market for all they want.... There will, perhaps, be more labor, because there will be more compulsion to it.... Towns and manufactures will increase, because more will be driven to them in quest of places and employment. This is the way in which the engrossing of farms naturally operates. And this is the way in which, for many years, it has been actually operating in this kingdom.’ He sums up the effect of the enclosures thus: ‘Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of day-laborers and hirelings; and, at the same time, their subsistence in that state has become more difficult.’ In fact, usurpation of the common lands and the revolution in agriculture accompanying this, told so acutely on the agricultural laborers that, even according to Eden, between 1765 and 1780, their wages began to fall below the minimum, and to be supplemented by official poor-law relief. Their wages, he says, ‘were not more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life…’

“In the 19^th century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural laborer and the communal property had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent times, have the agricultural population received a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords?” (Marx, Capital, ch. 27).

For the last expedients of great historic importance, for expropriating rural workers, one must rightly look to the Highlands of Scotland, where they had the most savage application. George Ensor, in a book published in 1818, says:

“The Scotch grandees dispossessed families as they would grub up coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as Indians harassed with wild beasts do, in their vengeance, a jungle with tigers.... Man is bartered for a fleece or a carcass of mutton, nay, held cheaper.... Why, how much worse is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had broken into the northern provinces of China, proposed in council to exterminate the inhabitants, and convert the land into pasture. This proposal many Highland proprietors have effected in their own country against their own countrymen” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 27, fn. 29).

“As an example of the method obtaining in the 19^th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.

“But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their idolatry, romantic and of the mountains, for the “great men” of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second time the Gaels were hunted out.

“But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into deer preserves” (Marx, Capital, ch. 27).

“In April 1866, 18 years after the publication of the work of Robert Somers quoted above, Professor Leone Levi gave a lecture before the Society of Arts on the transformation of sheep-walks into deer-forest, in which he depicts the advance in the devastation of the Scottish Highlands. He says, with other things: ‘Depopulation and transformation into sheep-walks were the most convenient means for getting an income without expenditure... A deer-forest in place of a sheep-walk was a common change in the Highlands. The landowners turned out the sheep as they once turned out the men … Immense tracts of land, much of which is described in the statistical account of Scotland as having a pasturage in richness and extent of very superior description, are thus shut out from all cultivation and improvement, and are solely devoted to the sport of a few persons for a very brief period of the year.’ The London Economist of June 2, 1866, says, ‘Among the items of news in a Scotch paper of last week, we read... “One of the finest sheep farms in Sutherlandshire, for which a rent of £1,200 a year was recently offered, on the expiry of the existing lease this year, is to be converted into a deer-forest.”’”(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 27, Note to the second edition).

Other newspapers, from the same era, speak further of these feudal instincts, which are more developed in England; but then some of these conclude, proving with figures, that such a fact has not lessened the national wealth at all.

“The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ‘free’ proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15^th and during the whole of the 16^th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.

“In England this legislation began under Henry VII.

“Henry VIII. 1530: Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s license. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their birthplace or to where they have lived the last three years and to ‘put themselves to labor.’ What grim irony! In 27 Henry VIII. the former statute is repeated, but strengthened with new clauses. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

“Thomas More says in his ‘Utopia’: ‘Therfore that on covetous and unsatiable cormaraunte and very plage of his native contrey maye compasse aboute and enclose many thousand akers of grounde together within one pale or hedge, the husbandman be thrust owte of their owne, or els either by coneyne and fraude, or by violent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wrongs and iniuries thei be so weried that they be compelled to sell all: by one meanes, therfore, or by other, either by hooke or crooke they muste needes departe awaye, poore, selye, wretched soules, men, women, husbands, wiues, fatherlesse children, widowes, wofull mothers with their yonge babes, and their whole household smal in substance, and muche in numbre, as husbandrye requireth many handes. Awaye thei trudge, I say, owte of their knowen accustomed houses, fyndynge no place to reste in. All their housholde stuffe, which is very little woorthe, thoughe it might well abide the sale: yet beeynge sodainely thruste owte, they be constrayned to sell it for a thing of naught. And when they haue wandered abrode tyll that be spent, what cant they then els doe but steale, and then iustly pardy be hanged, or els go about beggyng. And yet then also they be caste in prison as vagaboundes, because they go aboute and worke not: whom no man wyl set a worke though thei neuer so willyngly profer themselues therto.’ Of these poor fugitives of whom Thomas More says that they were forced to thieve, ‘7,200 great and petty thieves were put to death,’ in the reign of Henry VIII, [as Hollinshed says in his ‘Description of England’]” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28, fn. 2).

“Edward VI.: A statute of the first year of his reign, 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on forehead or back with the letter S; if he runs away thrice, he is to be executed as a felon. The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling about for three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded with a red-hot iron with the letter V on the breast and be set to work, in chains, in the streets or at some other labor. If the vagabond gives a false birthplace, he is then to become the slave for life of this place, of its inhabitants, or its corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young men until the 24^th year, the girls until the 20^th. If they run away, they are to become up to this age the slaves of their masters, who can put them in irons, whip them, &c., if they like. Every master may put an iron ring round the neck, arms or legs of his slave, by which to know him more easily and to be more certain of him. The last part of this statute provides, that certain poor people may be employed by a place or by persons, who are willing to give them food and drink and to find them work. This kind of parish slaves was kept up in England until far into the 19^th century under the name of ‘roundsmen’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

“The author of the ‘Essay on Trade, etc.,’ 1770, says, ‘In the reign of Edward VI. indeed the English seem to have set, in good earnest, about encouraging manufactures and employing the poor. This we learn from a remarkable statute which runs thus: “That all vagrants shall be branded, &c”’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28, fn. 1).

“Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless some one will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offense, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take them into service for two years; but for the third offense they are to be executed without mercy as felons” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

“In Elizabeth’s time, ‘rogues were trussed up apace, and that there was not one year commonly wherein three or four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by the gallowes.’ (Strype’s ‘Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and other Various Occurrences in the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign.’ Second ed., 1725, Vol. 2.) According to this same Strype, in Somersetshire, in one year, 40 persons were executed, 35 robbers burnt in the hand, 37 whipped, and 183 discharged as ‘incorrigible vagabonds.’ Nevertheless, he is of opinion that this large number of prisoners does not comprise even a fifth of the actual criminals, thanks to the negligence of the justices and the foolish compassion of the people; and the other counties of England were not better off in this respect than Somersetshire, while some were even worse” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28, fn. 2).

“James 1: Any one wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and a vagabond. Justices of the peace in petty sessions are authorized to have them publicly whipped and for the first offense to imprison them for 6 months, for the second for 2 years. Whilst in prison they are to be whipped as much and as often as the justices of the peace think fit... Incorrigible and dangerous rogues are to be branded with an R on the left shoulder and set to hard labor, and if they are caught begging again, to be executed without mercy. These statutes, legally binding until the beginning of the 18^th century, were only repealed [in 1714]” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

And here by means of such horrors, by means of so much blood the expropriation of the agricultural population is completed, and the formation of that working class, destined to feed modern industry. Less than idyllic! It was sword and fire that were the only origin of primitive accumulation; it was sword and fire that prepared the necessary environment for capital to develop, the mass of human force destined to nourish it; and if today sword and fire are no longer the ordinary means of the ever-growing accumulation, it is because it has another method, in its stead, much more inexorable and terrible, one of the glorious modern achievements of the bourgeoisie, a method that forms a necessary part of the mechanism itself of capitalist production, a method that acts by itself, without making much noise, without producing scandal, in short a perfectly civil method: hunger. And for him that rebels against hunger, always and forever sword and fire.

The modest size of this summary does not permit me to tell also of the glories of capital in the colonies. I refer the reader to the history of discoveries, starting from that of Christopher Columbus, and of all the colonizations, limiting myself only to cite in this regard the words of

“W. Howitt, a man who makes a specialty of Christianity, [who] says: ‘The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.’

“If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 31).

And this is pure, or bourgeois, history, a sad history of blood, which would deserve to be well read and meditated on by you, who know in your virtue how to conceive a holy horror for the lust of the blood of modern revolutionaries; by you, who declare not being able to allow the workers the sole use of the moral means.