'What contradictions in the economic sphere in particular! And what contradictions in the social sphere in general! The wealth of society is growing, and this growth is accompanied by a growth of poverty.--The creative efficiency of the means of production is increasing, and the consequence is that they are scrapped. Social conditions demand that the material position of the working classes should be raised to the level of their political status, and economic conditions, by way of answer, depress them further. Society needs the unrestricted growth of wealth, and contemporary leaders of production must create restrictions, in order to discourage poverty. In a single respect alone is there harmony: just as wrong as the conditions is the authoritative section of the society with its inclination to look for the root of the evil everywhere except in the right place. This egotism, which only too often dons the scholar's gown, also accuses the vices of the workers of being the cause of poverty. The responsibility for the crimes committed against them by all-powerful facts is ascribed to their alleged discontent and shiftlessness, and where even such egotism cannot close its eyes to their innocence, it makes an elaborate dogma of the "necessity of poverty". Unremittingly, it exhorts the workers only to work and to pray, impresses upon them the duty of abstinence and economy, and at best infringes upon their rights by the institution of compulsory saving, adding to the misery of the workers. It does not see that a blind force of commerce has transformed the prayer for work into the curse of enforced unemployment, that ... abstinence is impossible or cruel, and that, lastly, morals always remain ineffective if commended by those of whom the poet says that they drink wine in secret but preach water in public.'[238] Thirty years after Sismondi and Owen, twenty years after the indictment made by the English socialists, the followers of Ricardo, and last but not least, after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, such bold words alone cannot claim to break new ground. What matters above all now is the theoretical foundation of this indictment. Rodbertus here proposed a complete system which can be reduced to the following simple statements. Owing to the laws of an economy left to its own devices, the high level of labour productivity achieved by history, together with the institutions of positive law, that is to say the right of private ownership, a whole series of wrong and unethical phenomena had emerged: