to fifteen dollars in the lowest cases, and often of from one to one hundred dollars, in the course of the year,—this law seems quite a matter of course to those who happen to be exempt from its jurisdiction. The injustice is about the same in both cases. But the world at large appreciates but slightly or not at all, the injustice perpetrated upon the proletaire, because it has continued for so many centuries, because mankind has become accustomed to it by habit, and also because it has not yet assumed that paradoxical form in which a truth must reveal itself before it can force an entrance into unreceptive minds.
We have thus seen that great wealth in almost all cases, is due to the appropriation of the results of others' labor, not one's own. By their own labor alone, men are only able to support life from day to day, occasionally to lay by sufficient for times of sickness and old age, rarely to attain to regular prosperity. Some physicians, lawyers, authors, painters and other artists, have been able to turn their personal efforts to such advantage as to obtain annual incomes of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thus accumulate fortunes of millions, without resorting to speculation or illegitimate profits. But such persons are rare, numbering probably but two hundred or even one hundred, living at one time throughout the civilized world. And even their wealth, examined closer, has something of a parasitic character, with the sole exception of that amassed by the author. In his case, if he becomes a millionaire, it is owing to the fact that he has written a book of which one or two millions copies have been sold, showing that his wealth is the direct remuneration of his intellectual labor, paid him voluntarily and willingly by mankind in general. But when an artist sells a painting for a hundred thousand dollars, a surgeon
