The State will dole out charity. Thence to the English poor-law and the workhouse is but a step. There is but a slight difference, because even this stepmother of a society against whom we are in revolt has also been compelled to _temper_ her individualist principles; she, too, has had to make concessions in a communist direction and under the same form of charity. She, too, distributes halfpenny dinners to prevent the pillaging of her shops; builds hospitals--often very bad ones, but sometimes splendid ones--to prevent the ravages of contagious diseases. She, too, after having paid the hours of labour, shelters the children of those she has wrecked. She takes their needs into consideration and doles out charity. Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating "surplus value," of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists. And if the number of the poor increased so rapidly during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States, and to the increase of riches resulting from the exploitation of the East. These two causes tore asunder the bonds that kept men together in the agrarian and urban communities, and taught them to proclaim the principle of _wages_, so dear to the exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practiced in their tribal life. And it is this principle that is to spring from a revolution which men dare to call by the name of Social Revolution,--a name so dear to the starved, the oppressed, and the sufferers! It can never be. For the day on which old institutions will fall under the proletarian axe, voices will cry out: "Bread, shelter, ease for all!" And those voices will be listened to; the people will say: "Let us begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that we have never quenched. And when we shall have tasted of this joy, we will set to work to demolish the last vestiges of middle-class rule: its morality drawn from account books, its 'debit and credit' philosophy, its 'mine and yours' institutions. 'In demolishing we shall build,' as Proudhon said; and we shall build in the name of Communism and Anarchy." CHAPTER XIV CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION I Looking at society and its political organization from a different standpoint than that of all the authoritarian schools--for we start from a free individual to reach a free society, instead of beginning by the State to come down to the individual--we follow the same method in economic questions. We study the needs of the individuals, and the means by which they satisfy them, before discussing Production, Exchange, Taxation, Government, and so on. At first sight the difference may appear trifling, but in reality it upsets all the canons of official Political Economy.