(_a_) Saint-Simon had already emphasised the impossibility of workers and idlers coexisting in the new society. Industrialism could hold out no promise for the second class. Ability and labour only had any claim to remuneration. By some peculiar misconception, however, Saint-Simon had regarded capital as involving some degree of personal sacrifice which entitled it to special remuneration. It was here that the Saint-Simonians intervened. Was it not perfectly obvious that private property in capital was the worst of all privileges? The Revolution had swept away caste distinctions and suppressed the right of primogeniture, which tended to perpetuate inequality among members of the same family, but had failed to touch individual property and its privilege of “laying a toll upon the industry of others.” This right of levying a tax is the fundamental idea in all their definitions of private property.[467] Property, according to the generally accepted meaning of the term to-day, consists of wealth which is not destined to be immediately consumed, but which entitles its owner to a revenue. Within this category are included the two agents of production, land and capital. These are primarily instruments of production, whatever else they may be. Property-owners and capitalists—two classes that need not be distinguished for our present purpose—have the control of these instruments. Their function is to distribute them among the workers. The distribution takes place through a series of operations which give rise to the economic phenomena of interest and rent.[468] Consequently the worker, because of this concentration of property in the hands of a few individuals, is forced to share the fruits of his labour. Such an obligation is nothing short of the exploitation of one man by another,[469] an exploitation all the more odious because the privileges are carefully preserved for one section of the community. Thanks to the laws of inheritance, exploiter and exploited never seem to change places. To the retort that proprietors and capitalists are not necessarily idle—that many of them, in fact, work hard in order to increase their incomes—the Saint-Simonians reply that all this is beside the point. A certain portion of the income may possibly result from personal effort, but whatever they receive either as capitalists or proprietors can obviously only come from the labour of others, and that clearly is exploitation. It is not the first time we have encountered this word “exploitation.” We are reminded of the fact that Sismondi made use of it,[470] and the same term will again meet us in the writings of Marx and others. None of them, however, uses it in quite the same sense, and it might be useful to distinguish here between the various meanings of a term which plays such an important _rôle_ in socialist literature and which leads to so much confusion.