The Text-Book of Democracy
by Henry Mayers Hyndman (9780217109062)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. LABOUR. IN every civilized society the main point to be considered is the manner in which labour is applied to production, and the share of his own labour which in one shape or another the labourer gets in return. The ancient historical civilizations were chiefly built upon slavery. Here the labourer, his force of labour, and the material on which he expended it, all belonged to the master; and the wealth of the latter might almost be gauged by the number of slaves he possessed, though only a portion of them would be actually employed in the work of production. This employment of slave- labour renders any comparison between the state of society then and now almost futile; but the condition of the poor freemen in Rome and Athens, constantly exposed to the competition of slave-labour if they desired to work themselves, resembled that of the mean whites in the Southern States before the Civil War. The peasant proprietor, or the member of a village community, holds again a totally different position from that of the slave or the labourer of modern times. The peasant proprietor, or the craftsman owning his own tools and able to obtain his own materials, is master of himself, of his means of production, and ofhis produce, even though he may have to pay a portion of the latter to a feudal chief or rajah. In both cases, that of individual proprietorship and that of ownership in common of the produce'of a community, there may be and generally is perfect freedom, save the restrictions which arise from the necessity of producing sufficient for the social necessaries of life. It is quite possible that a man and his family may live on the produce of their own farm, carry on the simple operations of manufacture necessary to clothe them, and rarely have the need to exchange an...

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