1st. By giving legislative protection. Just as the landlord and the
money-lender are legally protected in their rights by the State, so the
labourer ought to be legally protected in his property, which are his
powers and time of labour. The State ought to give him legal security
against being robbed of these, his only property, by the operation of
free competition. With this view, Moufang demands the legalization of
working men's associations of various kinds, the prohibition of Sunday
labour, the legal fixing of a normal day of labour, legal restriction of
labour of women and children, legal provision against unwholesome
workshops, appointment of factory inspectors, and direct legal fixing of
the rate of wages. The last point is an important peculiarity in the
position of the Catholic Socialists. Moufang contends that competition
is a sound enough principle for regulating the price of commodities, but
that it is a very unsound one, and a very unsafe one, for determining
the price of labour, because he holds that labour is not a commodity.
Labour is a man's powers of life; it is the man himself, and the law
must see to its protection. The law protects the capitalist in his right
to his interest, and surely the labouring man's powers of life are
entitled to the same consideration. If an employer says to a capitalist
from whom he has borrowed money: "A crisis has come, a depression in
trade, and I am no longer able to pay such high interest; I will pay you
two-thirds or one-third of the previous rate," what does the capitalist
say? He refuses to take it, and why? Simply because he knows that the
law will sustain him in his claim. But if the employer says to his
labourer: "A depression of trade has come, and I cannot afford you more
than two-thirds or one-third of your present wages," what can the
labourer do? He has no alternative. He must take the wages offered him
or go, and to go means to starve. Why should not the law stand at the
labourer's back, as it does at the capitalist's, in enforcing what is
right and just? There is no more infraction of freedom in the one case
than in the other. Moufang's argument here is based on an illusive
analogy; for in the contract for the use of capital the employer agrees
to pay a fixed rate of interest so long as he retains the principal, and
he can only avail himself of subsequent falls in the money market by
returning the principal and opening a fresh contract; whereas in the
contract for the use of labour the employer engages by the week or the
day, returning the principal, as it were, at the end of that term, and
making a new arrangement. The point to be noted, however, is that
Moufang's object, like Ketteler's, is to deliver working men from their
hand-to-mouth dependence on the current fluctuations of the market; that
he thinks there is something not merely pernicious but radically unjust
in their treatment under the present system; and that he calls upon the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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