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But we charge their guilt, their legal crimes, on the ruling class which has made them what they are. No doubt, they are guilty, not only in the opinion of the existing iniquitous law, but of eternal humane law; but far more guilty are the present incompetent and inhumane rulers of society and the State. Their reeking corruption, their perversion of all truth in science and morals to base ends, their incompetence to remedy the evils which they inflict upon the innocent majority of sufferers under their unnatural and immoral laws condemn them. We do not deny that there are, in this ruling class, very many well-meaning, but misinformed persons; but their utter blindness to the facts that round about them stare into their faces, is of itself inexcusable.
We can now return to the exposition of what Social Democracy is. The foregoing excursion was indispensable to the better understanding of what follows:
Our Socio-Democratic science demonstrates that the present form of Society and Government works its own speedy destruction. Seen from the economical standpoint, society produces more, and is able to produce many times more, than it can consume. Side by side with enormous stores of grain, flour, victuals, millions of men, women and children are unable to procure by work the means wherewith to buy sufficient food. Men and women willing to work in the line of clothing and covering of the body do actually freeze or sicken in front of filled magazines of tissues, clothing and men's and women's wear. Builders of houses, miners of fuel, workers in furniture may not find a dwelling, may be unable to warm their bodies and ease their weary limbs, while there is an abundance of goods that might satisfy their wants. The execrable nonsense, the incredible folly is a tangible reality, that there are too many workers of every kind and—at the same time—too many persons unable to purchase what they could produce, just because there is too much merchandize of every kind for sale. Men by the million are becoming superfluous because they have not the means to work, while such means exist in too great an abundance. And this insane state of things is formed at a time when the most stupendous discoveries and inventions are known and may be made almost to order. The age of scientific wonders and technical perfection is also the age of total inability of the learned world to remedy the simplest wants of the greatest number of persons! Less than a century after the spurious discovery made by Malthus that mankind would multiply in a geometrical, and their food only in an arithmetical progression, the fact is established, that food and all the first necessities of man are being produced in a far greater ratio than we find purchasers!
