3. The dominion which property involves, of the possessors over the
non-possessors, is based on the physical force of the ruled.
Those very men of the non-possessing classes who through property are
dependent on the possessing classes must do police duty, serve in the
army, pay the taxes out of which police and army are kept up, and in
these and other ways either themselves exercise or at least support the
physical force by which property is upheld.[1101] "If there did not
exist these men who are ready to discipline or kill any one whatever at
the word of command, no one would dare assert what the non-laboring
landlords now do all of them so confidently assert,--that the soil which
surrounds the peasants who die off for lack of land is the property of a
man who does not work on it";[1102] it would "not come into the head of
the lord of the manor to take from the peasants a forest that has grown
up under their eyes";[1103] nor would any one say "that the stores of
grain accumulated by fraud in the midst of a starving population must
remain unscathed that the merchant may have his profit."[1104]
II. _Love requires that a distribution based solely on its commandments
take the place of property._ "The impossibility of continuing the life
that has hitherto been led, and the necessity of determining new forms
of life,"[1105] relate to the distribution of goods as well as to other
things. "The abolition of property,"[1106] and its replacement by a new
kind of distribution of goods, is one of the "questions now in
order."[1107]
According to the law of love, every man who works as he has strength
should have so much--but only so much--as he needs.
1. That every man who works as he has strength should have so much as he
needs and no more is a corollary from two precepts which follow from the
law of love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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