In order to give itself a satisfactory answer to the question, science must first of all deny that wrong division of the agents of production, and cease to acknowledge the result of the phenomena as being their cause; and she must seek, first the more obvious, and then the remoter, causes of those phenomena which constitute the matter questioned. Science must answer the question, Why are some men deprived of land and tools while others possess both? or, Why is it that lands and tools are taken from the people who labour on the land and work with the tools? And as soon as economic science puts this question to herself she will get new ideas which will transform all the previous ideas of sham science,--which has been moving in an unalterable circle of propositions,--that the miserable condition of the workers proceeds from the fact that they are miserable. To simple-minded persons it must seem unquestionable that the obvious reason of the oppression of some men by others is money. But science, denying this, says that money is only a medium of exchange, which has no connection with slavery of men. Let us see whether it is so or not. CHAPTER XVIII What is the origin of money? What are the conditions under which nations always have money, and under what circumstances need nations not use money? There are small tribes in Africa, and one in Australia, who live as the Sknepies and the Drevlyans lived in olden times. These tribes lived by breeding cattle and cultivating gardens. We become acquainted with them at the dawn of history, and history begins by recording the fact that some invaders appear on the scene. And invaders always do the same thing: they take away from the aborigines everything they can take,--cattle, corn, and cloth; they even make prisoners, male and female, and carry them away. In a few years the invaders appear again, but the people have not yet got over the consequences of their first misfortunes, and there is scarcely anything to take from them; so the invaders invent new and better means of making use of their victims. These methods are very simple, and present themselves naturally to the mind of all men. The _first_ is personal slavery. There is a drawback to this, because the invaders must take over the entire control and administration of the tribe, and feed all the slaves; hence, naturally, there appears the _second_. The people are left on their own land, but this becomes the recognized property of the invaders, who portion it out among the leading military men, by whose means the labour of the tribe is utilized and transferred to the conquerors. But this, too, has its drawback. It is inconvenient to have to oversee all the production of the conquered people, and thus the _third_ means is introduced, as primitive as the two former; this is, the levying of a certain obligatory tax to be paid by the conquered at stated periods.