6 9 



people of his establishment wages two or 

 three times higher than the current rate, he 

 would evidently meet with the same fate, 

 because he would meet with the same 

 economic laws and he would be obliged to 

 sell his goods at a loss or keep them unsold in 

 his shops owing to his price for equal qualities 

 being higher than the market rate. 



He would be declared a bankrupt, and the 

 world would bring him no other consolation 

 than the epithet of worthy man, and, in this 

 phase of " commercial morality,"* we know 

 what this expression signifies. 



Beyond the personal relations more or less 

 cordial between capitalists and workers, their 

 respective economic condition is inevitably 

 determined by the present organisation, 

 according to the law of surplus value which 

 has allowed Marx to explain in an irrefutable 

 manner how the capitalist can accumulate 

 riches without working because the workman 

 produces in his day's work an equivalent of 

 wealth greater than the wages received, and 

 the surplus of the product forms the gratuitous 

 profit of the capitalist, even if one deducts the 

 salary for his technical and administrative 

 management. 



The land left to sun and rain does not 

 produce by itself corn or wine. The minerals 



* I make use of the expression "commercial morality" 

 which M. Letourneau has employed in his book on 

 L'tvolution de la morale, Paris, 1887. In his positive 

 study of facts concerning morality, M. Letourneau has 

 distinguished four phases animal morality, savage 

 morality, barbarian morality, commercial or bourgeois 

 morality ; to these phases will succeed a phase of superior 

 morality which Malon had called social morality. 



