Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
loses every trace of what it was in its origin. At that point every vestige of the moral idea of property has departed, and there can be no longer question of the moral duty of defending it. Here there can no longer be any understanding of the meaning of property as it exists in the breast of the man who has to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. The worst of all is, that the opinions and habits generated by such causes unfortunately gradually extend to circles in which they would not have appeared spontaneously without contagious contact.[1] The influence of the millions won by stock-jobbing extends even to the poor man’s hut; and the same person who, in another environment, would have tasted, in his own experience, the blessings of labor, feels that same labor, under the enervating pressure of such an atmosphere, a curse, and only a curse. Communism thrives only in those quagmires in which the
- ↑ An interesting proof of this is furnished by the small German university cities, supported mainly by students. The manner in which these think and act in the matter of spending money is involuntarily communicated to the population.
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