Note 25 — CRIMINALITY.

But it is not always a growing altruistic sentiment that has been the motive in these changes. The life of prisoners of war has not been spared from reasons of humanity, but because the extension of the productivity of labor made it more profitable to make a prisoner work than to kill him. And slavery was not abolished because slave-owners had become less egoistic, but because it was more profitable to make free laborers work than to make slaves do so.25 We cannot speak of the diminution of egoism, but of the moderating of violence in the course of time. It cannot be maintained that a capitalist who tries by a lock-out to force his workmen to break with their union, in order that he may escape the danger of a decrease in his profits through a strike, and who in this way condemns them and their families to hunger, is less egoistic than the slave-owner driving his slaves to harder labor. The former does not use force—it is useless—he has a surer weapon at his command, the suffering with which he can strike his workmen; he seems less egoistic, but in reality is as egoistic as the latter. The great speculator who, by manipulating the market, forces thousands of persons to pay more for the necessaries of life, and to become his tributaries as it were, is not less egoistic than the robber-baron of the middle ages who, arms in hand, forced the traveling merchants to pay him tribute. The difference is merely that the former attains his end without using violence like the latter. Capitalism is a system of exploitation in which, in place of the exploited person’s being robbed he is compelled by poverty to use all his powers for the benefit of the exploiter.26