8 
THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
will thus be made universal. No person should enjoy super 
fluities, as long as anybody lacks necessaries ; for the right of 
property in objects of luxury can have no foundation until each 
citizen has his share in the necessaries of life. Farmers and 
labourers should form partnerships, so as to produce the most 
with the least possible exertion.” The essential ideas of the 
Socialism of to-day, as regards both the notion of right and 
its realization, are contained in embryo in the foregoing lines, 
which were manifestly inspired by Rousseau and the eighteenth 
century philosophers. 
After Fichte must be mentioned the tailor Weitling, who 
was deeply imbued with the ideas of Fourrier and Cabet. Fox 
some years he endeavoured to promulgate them throughout 
Switzerland and Southern Germany. In 1835 he published 
his first work, entitled “ Humanity as it is, and as it should 
be.” * In 1841, at Vevey, he issued a German paper in which 
he urged the working men to establish a democratic republic. 
Finally, in a book published at Zurich (1842), entitled “The 
Guarantees and Harmonies of Liberty,” j" he preached the 
Communism of Babeuf and Rousseau. “Absolute equality,” 
he asserts, “ can be established only by the total destruction of 
the existing State organization. It can admit of administration 
only, and not of government. Property, when first instituted, 
was endurable ; it did not then take away from anybody the 
right and the means of becoming a landowner, for there was no 
money, while there was vacant land in abundance. From the 
moment, however, that every free man could no longer appro 
priate a part of the soil, property has ceased to be a right. It 
has become a crying evil, and the cause of the misery and 
destitution of the masses. I bid you open your prisons and 
say to those shut up there, ‘ You know no more than we what 
property means ; let us combine our efforts to overturn these 
walls, these hedges, these barriers, in order that the cause of 
our enmity may disappear, and that we may live together as 
brothers.’ ” This is, in the main, the language of Rousseau on 
the origin of inequality. 
* Die Menscheit, wie sie ist und sein solle. 
t Garantien und Harmonien der Freiheit.