IF the choice were to be made between Communism, with all its chances, and the present state of society, with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it, as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse proportion to the labour-the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in a descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life: if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism, would be but as dust in the balance."-JOHN STUART MILL. |