Ä'AÄL MARX. 
33 
Of his land, and his profits, or the remuneration for his risks and 
^ long before him. maintained 
ha the destitution of the lower classes proceeds from the fact 
that the labourer cannot purchase with his wages what he pro 
duces. The remark is true, but the fact cannot be otherwise 
unless the labourer, like the peasant proprietor, should work 
his own property, being at the same time owner of the land 
the machines, the provisions and the materials necessary for 
production. If he has to borrow these different agents he 
must deduct from what he produces the means of paying for 
them, for nobody will lend them to him for nothing. If it is 
the manufacturer who provides them, he must take from the 
total produce of the workman’s labour what will pay interest 
on Ijis advances. Who would accumulate capital or employ a 
single labourer, if he did not reap any profit thereby? 
Like Proudhon, Marx then arrives, but without admitting 
It, at the often refuted chimera of gratuitous credit 
The history of the social organizations of different periods 
proves that the deduction of a portion of the fruits of labour 
by those who have the indispensable requisites of productions 
at their disposal, has always taken place under one form or 
another. Under the system of slavery, the slave-owner received 
the entire produce of the labour, and, giving to the slave what 
was necessary for his support and to enable him to perpetuate 
his race, kept all the rest for himself. It was as though the 
slave worked part of the time for himself and the rest for his 
master. Under the régime of the conjé,, the peasant worked 
two or three days on the land of his lord and the rest of the 
Ume on his own. He was half enfranchised, but a part of what 
he produced was levied on behalf of the signorial demesne. 
With the méíaycr system, it was no longer the labour that was 
divided between master and labourer, but the products ot 
Ubour, which comes in the end to the same thing. Modern 
farming, in its turn, is only a transformation of the mé/ayer 
system, with this difference, that the farmer pays the land 
owner’s share in money. Still he works part of his time for 
ois own subsistence and the remainder for that of his landlord, 
o has given him the land. In the wage-earning classes the