“… If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”
T.N. Foulis
London & Edinburgh
1912
To
E.S.P. Haynes
Published October 1912
Printed by Neill and Co., Ltd., Edinburgh.
The Subject of this Book:—It is written to maintain the thesis that industrial society as we know it will tend towards the re-establishment of slavery.
—The sections into which the book will be divided
Definitions:—What wealth is and why necessary to man—How produced—The meaning of the words Capital, Proletariat, Property, Means of Production—The definition of the Capitalist State—The definition of the Servile State—What it is and what it is not—The re-establishment of status in the place of contract—That servitude is not a question of degree but of kind—Summary of these definitions.
Our Civilisation was originally Servile:—The Servile institution in Pagan antiquity—Its fundamental character—A Pagan society took it for granted—The institution disturbed by the advent of the Christian Church
How the Servile Institution was for a Time Dissolved:—The subconscious effect of the Faith in this matter—The main elements of Pagan economic society—The Villa—The transformation of the agricultural slave into the Christian serf—Next into the Christian peasant—The corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the Distributive State—It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages—“It was not machinery that lost us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind.”
How the Distributive State Failed:—This failure original in England—The story of the decline from Distributive property to Capitalism—The economic revolution of the sixteenth century—The confiscation of monastic land—What might have happened had the State retained it—As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy—England is Capitalist before the advent of the industrial revolution—Therefore modern industry, proceeding from England, has grown in a Capitalist mould.
The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable:—It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an earlier and a later stable state of society—The two internal strains which render it unstable—(a) The conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis—(b) The insecurity and insufficiency to which it condemns free citizens—The few possessors can gra