The new philosophy will tend more and more to replace “the vague and stormy discussion of rights, by the calm and strict determination of respective duties.” Henceforth, the problem raised by the communists assumes a new aspect. That there should be powerful industrial masters is only an evil if they use their power to oppress the men who depend upon them. It is a good thing, on the contrary, if these masters know and fulfil their duties. It is of little consequence to popular interests in whose hands capital is accumulated, so long as the use made of it is beneficial to the social masses.[346] Now this essential condition “depends far more upon moral than upon political measures.” The latter can undoubtedly prevent the accumulation of riches in a small number of hands, at the risk of paralysing industrial activity. But these “tyrannical” proceedings would be far less efficacious than the universal reproof inflicted by positive ethics upon a selfish use of the riches possessed. The reproof would be all the more irresistible, because of the fact that the very people who would have to submit to it could not challenge its principle, inculcated in all by the common moral education.” It is thus that in the Middle Ages, excommunication was not less feared by the princes who incurred it than it was by the peoples who witnessed it. Once common education was established, under the direction of the spiritual power, the tyranny of the capitalist class would be no more to be feared. Rich men would consider themselves as the moral guardians of public capital. It is not here a question of charity. Those who possess will have the “duty” of securing, first, education and then work for all. These ideas seem perhaps paradoxical and chimerical. But, says Comte, this is because modern society has not yet got its system of morality. Industrial relations which have become immensely developed in it are abandoned to a dangerous empiricism, instead of being systematised according to _moral_ laws. War, more or less openly declared, alone regulates the relations between capital and labour. In a normal state of humanity these relations, on the contrary, are “organised.” Strength does not generate oppression. Every citizen is a “public functionary,” whose well-defined functions determine at once his obligations and his claims (that is to say his rights). Property is a function like any other, and not a privilege. It serves for the formation and administration of capital by means of which each generation prepares the work of the next. Those who hold it must not turn it from its public use to their own individual advantage.[347]