CATHOLIC  SOCIALISTS.

133
sary  laws  which  determine  the  sequence  of  natural  phenomena.
The  consequence  is  that  it  is  impossible  to  apply  the  notion  of
justice  and  right  to  the  relations  of  capital  and  labour.  These
relations  are,  they  say,  regulated  by  the  fatal  law  of  supply  and
demand  which  it  is  vain  to  seek  to  modify.  What  would  be
the  good  of  invoking  an  alleged  right  which  it  is  absolutely
impossible  to  apply  ?  Labour  is  a  commodity,  the  price  of
which  is  fixed  in  the  same  way  as  that  of  all  other  commodities
by  the  free  bargaining  of  the  two  parties.  Christianity  or
Catholicism  have  no  more  business  here  than  if  it  was  a
question  of  physics  or  astronomy.  This  is  the  way  in  which
Liberal  economics  come  to  deny  any  rights  to  the  workers.
The  Catholico-Socialist  print  further  accuses  Economists  of
having  completely  misunderstood  the  principle  of  property  in
deriving  it  from  labour.  Property,  it  asserts,  is  a  principle
{moment)  which  is  subordinate  to  labour  neither  in  its  origin
nor  in  its  importance.  Liberalism  has,  then,  falsified  all  the
bases  of  a  true  civilization,  labour,  property,  liberty,  right,  and
justice.  The  influence  of  this  pernicious  doctrine  must  be
broken  and  annihilated.  It  leads  to  revolution.  The  first
thmg  to  do  is  to  re-establish  the  corporations,  to  regulate
industry,  to  fix  wages  by  law,  while  creating  a  special  macis
^rec^t)^  articles  of  the  “Labour  Code”  (Arääts-It
  is  easy  to  understand  the  success  which  doctrines  of  th\.
sort  must  have  met  with  among  that  portion  of  the  labouring
class  which  was  not  yet  completely  won  over  to  the  a  C
religious  and  atheistic  movement  preached  by  the  democZL
agitators.  They  were  simply  the  ideas  of  Marx  and  Lassalle
"we^ed^mh  a  s^^^(:^h^ic  v^nWi,and  «mn«:ted  bv^
few  quotations,  with  the  teachings  of  the  Fathers  of  the  Churrh
converted  to  Socalism,  gained  the  adhesion  of  two  veri
numerous  classes  that  the  Social  Democrats  were  unable  to
reach.  In  the  first  place,  they  won  over  the  rural  proprietors,
and  especially  the  petty  aristocracy  of  the  country  districts,
the  squireens,  who,  not  sharing  in  the  growing  wealth  of