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