# Expropriation/Chapter 2

Section 2 of Chapter 4 of The Conquest of Bread
II.
The landlord owes his riches to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth of the capitalist comes from the same source.
Take the case of a citizen of the middle class who, somehow or other, finds himself in possession of £20,000. He could, of course, spend his money at the rate of o£ £2,000 a year, a mere bagatelle in these days of fantastic, senseless luxury. But then he would have nothing left at the end of ten years. So, being a "practical person," he prefers to ​keep his fortune intact, and win for himself a snug little annual income as well.
That is very easy in our society, for the good reason that the towns and villages swarm with workers who have not the wherewithal to live for a month, or even a fortnight. So our worthy citizen starts a factory: the banks hasten to lend him another £20,000, especially if he has a reputation for "business ability"; and with this round sum he can command the labor of five hundred hands.
If all the men and women in the country-side had their daily bread sure and their daily needs already satisfied, who would work for our capitalist, or be willing to manufacture for him, at a wage of half-a-crown a day, commodities selling in the market for a crown or even more?
Unhappily—we know it all too well—the poor quarters of our towns and the neighbouring villages are full of needy wretches, whose children clamour for bread. So, before the factory is well finished, the workers hasten to offer themselves. Where a hundred are required a thousand besiege the doors, and from the time his mill is started the owner, if he is not more than commonly stupid, will clear £40 a year oat of each mill-hand he employs.
He is thus able to lay by a snug little fortune, and if he chooses a lucrative trade, and if he has "business talents," he will increase his income by doubling the number of the men he exploits.
So he becomes a personage of importance. He can afford to give dinners to other personages, to the local magnates, the civic, legal, and political dignitaries. With his money he can "marry money," by-and-by he may pick and choose places for his children, and later on perhaps get something good from the government—a contract for the army or for the police. His gold breeds gold; till at last a war, or even a rumour of war, or a speculation on the Stock Exchange, gives him his great opportunity.
Nine-tenths of the huge fortunes made in the United States are (as Henry George has shown in his "Social Problems") the result of knavery on a large scale, assisted by the State. In Europe nine-tenths of the fortunes made in our Monarchies and Republics have the same origin. There are not two ways of becoming a millionaire.
This is the secret of wealth; find the starving and destitute, pay them half-a-crown, and make them produce ten shillings worth in the day, amass a fortune by these means, and then increase it by some lucky hit, made with the help of the State.
Need we go on to speak of small fortunes attributed by the economists to forethought and frugality, when we know that mere saving in ​itself brings in nothing, so long as the pence saved are not used to exploit the famishing?
Take a shoemaker, for instance. Grant that his work is well paid, that he has plenty of custom, and that by dint of strict frugality he contrives to lay by from eighteen pence to two shillings a day, perhaps £2 a month.
Grant that our shoemaker is never ill, that he does not half starve himself, in spite of his passion for economy; that he does not marry or that he has no children; that he does not die of consumption; suppose anything and everything you please!
Well, at the age of fifty he will not have scraped together £800; and he will not have enough to live on during his old age, when he is past work. Assuredly this is not how great fortunes are made. But suppose our shoemaker, as soon as he has laid by a few pence, thriftily conveys them to the savings-bank, and that the savings-bank lends them to the capitalist who is just about to "employ labor"—i.e., to exploit the poor. Then our shoemaker takes an apprentice, the child of some poor wretch who will think himself lucky if in five years time his son has learned the trade and is able to earn his living.
Meanwhile our shoemaker does not lose by him; and if trade is brisk he soon takes a second, and than a third apprentice. By-and-by he will take two or three journeymen—poor wretches, thankful to receive half-a-crown a day for work that is worth five shillings, and if our shoemaker is "in luck," that is to say, if he is keen enough and mean enough, his journeymen and apprentices will bring him in nearly £1 a day, over and above the product of his own toil. He can then enlarge his business. He will gradually become rich, and no longer have any need to stint himself in the necessaries of life. He will leave a snug little fortune to his son.
That is what people call "being economical and having frugal, temperate habits." At bottom it is nothing more nor less than grinding the face of the poor.
Commerce seems an exception to this rule. "Such a man," we are told, "buys tea in China, brings it to France and realises a profit of thirty per cent, on his original outlay. He has exploited nobody"
Nevertheless, the case is analogous. If our merchant had carried his bales on his back, well and good! In early medieval times, that was exactly how foreign trade was conducted, and so no one reached such giddy heights of fortune as in our days. Very few, and very hardly earned, were the gold coins which the medieval merchant gained from a long and dangerous voyage. It was less the love of money than the thirst of travel and adventure that inspired his undertakings.
​Now-a-days the method is simpler. A merchant who has some capital need not stir from his desk to become wealthy. He telegraphs to an agent telling him to buy a hundred tons of tea, he freights a ship, and in a few weeks, in three months, if it is a sailing ship, the vessel brings him his cargo. He does not even take the risks of the voyage, for his tea and his vessel are insured, and if he has expended four thousand pounds he will receive more than five thousand; that is to say, if he has not attempted to speculate in some novel commodities, in which case he runs a chance of either doubling his fortune or losing it altogether.
Now, how could he find men willing to cross the sea, to travel to China and back, to endure hardship and slavish toil and to risk their lives for a miserable pittance? How could he find dock-laborers willing to load and unload his ships for "starvation wages?" How? Because they are needy and starving. Go to the sea-ports, visit the cook-shops and taverns on the quays, and look at these men who have come to hire themselves crowding round the dock-gates, which they besiege from early dawn, hoping to be allowed to work on the vessels. Look at these sailors, happy to be hired for a long voyage, after weeks and months of waiting. All their lives long they have gone down to the sea in ships, and they will sail in others still, until the day when they perish in the waves.
Enter their cabins, look at their wives and children in rags, living one knows not how till the father's return, and you will have the answer to the question. Multiply examples, choose them where you will, consider the origin of all fortunes, large or small, whether arising out of commerce, finance, manufactures, or the land. Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. An Anarchist society need not fear the advent of an unknown Rothschild who would seek to settle in its midst. If every member of the community knows that after a few hours of productive toil he will have a right to all the pleasures that civilisation procures, and to those deeper sources of enjoyment which art and science offer to all who seek them, he will not sell his strength for a starvation wage. No one will volunteer to work for the enrichment of your Rothschild. His golden guineas will be only so many pieces of metal—useful for various purposes, but incapable of breeding more.
In answering the above objection we have at the same time indicated the scope of Expropriation. It must extend to all that permits any one, no matter whom—financier, mill-owner, or landlord—to appropriate the, product of others' toil. Our formula is simple and comprehensive.
We do not want to rob any one of his coat, but we wish to give to ​the workers all those things the lack of which makes them fall an easy prey to the exploiter, and we will do our utmost that none shall lack aught, that not a single man shall be forced to sell the strength of his right arm to obtain a bare subsistence for himself and his babes. That is what we mean when we talk of Expropriation; that will be our duty during the Revolution, for whose coming we look, not two hundred years hence, bat soon, very soon.