‘But in virtue of this law they demand the abolition of all the privileges of birth without exception, and consequently the destruction of the right of inheritance, the greatest of those privileges, which at present comprehends them all, and of which the effect is to leave to chance the distribution of social privileges amongst the small number of those who can lay claim to them, and to condemn the most numerous class to depravation, ignorance, and misery. ‘They demand that all the instruments of labour, land, and capital, which at present form the divided stock of private proprietors, should be exploited by associations with a suitable gradation of functions, so that the task of each may be the expression of his capacity, and his riches the measure of his services. ‘The Saint-Simonists do not attack the institution of private property, except in so far as it consecrates for some the impious privilege of idleness—that is to say, of living on the labour of others; except as it leaves to the accident of birth the social status of individuals. ‘Christianity has delivered women from slavery, but it has nevertheless condemned them to an inferior position, and in Christian Europe we still see them everywhere deprived of religious, political, and civil rights. ‘The Saint-Simonists announce their final liberation, their complete emancipation, but they do not aim at abolishing the sacred law of marriage proclaimed by Christianity; on the contrary, they desire to fulfil this law, to give it a new sanction, to add to the authority and inviolability of the union which it consecrates. ‘Like Christians they demand that a single man be united to a single woman; but they teach that the wife should become the equal of the husband, and that, according to the special grace with which God has endowed her sex, she should be associated in the exercise of the triple function of religion, the State, and the family, so that the social individual, which hitherto has been the man only, may henceforward be man and woman. ‘The religion of Saint-Simon seeks only to abolish the shameful traffic, the legal prostitution, which, under the name of marriage, at present so frequently consecrates the unnatural union of self-sacrifice and egotism, of intelligence and ignorance, of youth and decrepitude. ‘Such are the most general ideas of the Saint-Simonists on the changes which they demand in the arrangements of property and in the social condition of women.’ PROGRAMME OF THE SOCIALISTIC WORKING MEN’S PARTY OF GERMANY Gotha, _May_ 1875. I. Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture, and as useful work in general is possible only through society, so to society, that is to all its members, the entire product belongs; while as the obligation to labour is universal, all have an equal right to such product, each one according to his reasonable needs.