‹Prolétaires!› men who live by wages! I undertake to demonstrate that you obtain the fruits of the land of which you are not the owners with less pain and effort than if you were obliged to raise those fruits by your own direct labour,—with less than if that land had been given to you in its primitive state, and before being prepared for cultivation by labour. Capitalists and labourers! I believe myself in a position to establish the law that, in proportion as capital is accumulated, the ‹absolute› share of the total product falling to the capitalist increases, and his ‹proportional› share is diminished; while both the ‹absolute› and ‹relative› share of the product falling to the labourer is augmented,—the reverse effects being produced when capital is lessened or dissipated.[14] If this law be established, the obvious deduction is, [p044] a harmony of interests between labourers and those who employ them. Disciples of Malthus! sincere and calumniated philanthropists, whose only fault has been in warning mankind against the effects of a law which you believe to be fatal, I shall have to submit to you another law more reassuring:—“‹Cæteris paribus›, increasing density of population is equivalent to increasing facility of production.” And if it be so, I am certain it will not be you who will grieve to see a stumbling-block removed from the threshold of our favourite science. Men of spoliation! you who, by force or fraud, by law or in spite of law, batten on the people’s substance; you, who live by the errors you propagate, by the ignorance you cherish, by the wars you light up, by the trammels with which you hamper trade; you who tax labour after having rendered it unproductive, making it lose a sheaf for every handful you yourselves pluck from it; you who cause yourselves to be paid for creating obstacles, in order to get afterwards paid for partially removing those obstacles; incarnations of egotism in its worst sense; parasitical excrescences of a vicious policy, prepare for the sharpest and most unsparing criticism. To you alone I make no appeal, for the design of this book is to sacrifice you, or rather to sacrifice your unjust pretensions. In vain we cherish conciliation. There are two principles which can never be reconciled—Liberty and Constraint. If the laws of Providence are harmonious, it is when they act with freedom, without which there is no harmony. Whenever, then, we remark an absence of harmony, we may be sure that it proceeds from an absence of liberty, an absence of justice. Oppressors, spoliators, contemners of justice, you can have no part in the universal harmony, for it is you who disturb it. Do I mean to say that the effect of this work may be to enfeeble power, to shake its stability, to diminish its authority? My design is just the opposite. But let me not be misunderstood.