ABSTRACT
This chapter examines attentively the societies developing at the present day in the civilised countries of the old and new worlds. It describes one common phenomenon: absolutely and irrevocably all of them fall into two distinct and separate classes. One class accumulates in utter idleness enormous and ever-increasing revenues, the other, far more numerous, labours life-long for miserable wages; one class lives without working, the other works without living—without living a life, at least, worthy of the name. The mixed association constitutes the final economic form towards which society is unconsciously tending; while capitalistic property, represents, in its successive phases, the several stages in this evolution, the long and painful process of elaboration from which the definitive economic organisation of humanity will one day emerge. Certain economic phenomena of the middle ages also illustrate the effects produced/by the existence of free land.
