“Shall I speak of the counterfeiters of every description? Shall I also speak of the usurers, the great thieves, the wolves of the bourse and the bank, the contractors and monopolists? Shall I speak of those who enriched themselves by means of public calamities, who desired or provoked invasions or wars in order to make their fortunes, and famines in order to amass money in the midst of corpses? Shall I speak of the thieves who risked the public health by adulterating the food and drink that they sold, and of those other great robbers, the heads of the army, who pillaged foreign peoples while exposing their own country to terrible reprisals? Finally shall I speak of the innumerable means of amassing money at the expense of others, and of the innumerable individuals in almost all classes who daily practiced them? “Not all these acts were classed as thefts by the law. The most inexcusable, the most harmful, those which were only practiced by the rich, even enjoyed legal impunity. But all of them were, nevertheless, in reality according to the rules of a sound morality, thefts. Each class presented, without doubt, many exceptions. There were some rich men as honest as possible, and many workers and poor men were persons of probity; but it may be said that by force of circumstances, and as an irresistible consequence of the inequality of fortune, all men, rich and poor, were generally induced to commit actions which were in reality only a kind of theft. “And often theft led to all kinds of cruelty, to murder, and even to the most barbarous tortures in order to make owners reveal where they had hidden their gold. How many poisonings and parricides did the thirst for gold or inheritance excite! Thieves kidnapped children in order to prostitute them. They even stole and murdered young people in order to sell the flesh of their corpses! “In a word, neither confidence nor security was possible. Each individual saw enemies in almost all the others; and society seemed, as it were, but a haunt of cut-throats in the midst of a forest! And all these horrors, which you will find more or less everywhere, were with us, and are still elsewhere—I cannot repeat it too often—the inevitable result of the unrestricted right of property.” [29] XIII. F. ENGELS.