surplus value, about which people are so fond of talking, could begin to be accumulated it was necessary that there should be poverty-stricken wretches who would consent to sell their labor force rather than die of hunger. It is poverty that has made the rich. And if poverty had advanced by such rapid strides by the end of the Middle Ages,, it was chiefly because the invasions and wars, the creation of States and the development of their authority, the wealth gained by exploitation in the East, and many other causes of a like nature, broke the bonds which once united agrarian and urban communities, and led them, in place of the solidarity which they once practised, to adopt the principle of the wage-system.
Is this principle to be the outcome of the Revolution? Dare we dignify by the name of a Social Revolution—that name so dear to the hungry, the suffering and the oppressed—the triumph of such a principle as this?
It cannot be so. For, on the day when ancient institutions splinter into fragments before the axe of the proletariat, voices will be heard shouting: Bread for all! Lodging for all 1 Right for all to the comforts of life!
And these voices will be heeded. The people will say to them selves: Let us begin by satisfying our thirst for the life, the joy, the liberty we have never known. And when all have tasted hap piness, we will set to work; the work of demolishing the last vestiges of middle-class rule, with its account-book morality, its philosophy of debit and credit, its institutions of mine and thine. "While we throw down we shall be building," as Proudhon said; we shall build in the name of Communism and of Anarchy.
