Furthermore, on no horizon can be seen any force now capable of resisting effectively this heretofore efficient tendency. On the contrary, the interference of the past, which temporarily blocked the process, is obviously becoming weaker and weaker. The international relations of commerce and trade acquired among the nations a preponderating importance over the diminishing warlike and political relations; and in the intra-national sphere, by reason of the same process of economic development, movable capital, the creation of the right to peace, preponderates in ever increasing measure over landed property rights, the creation of the right of war. At the same time superstition more and more loses its influence. And therefore one is justified in concluding that the tendency so marked will work out to its logical end, excluding the political means and all its works, until the complete victory of the economic means is attained.
But it may be objected that in the modern constitutional state all the more prominent remnants of the antique law of war have already been chiseled out.
On the contrary, there survives a considerable remnant of these institutions, masked it is true in economic garb, and apparently no longer a legal privilege but only economic right, _the ownership of large estates--the first creation and the last stronghold of the political means_. Its mask has preserved it from undergoing the fate of all other feudal creations. And yet this last remnant of the right of war is doubtless the last unique obstacle in the pathway of humanity; and doubtless the _development of economics_ is on its way to destroy it.
To substantiate these remarks I must refer the reader to other books, wherein I have given the detailed evidence of the above and can not in the space allotted here repeat it at large.[143] I can only re-state the principal points made in these books.
There is no difference in principle between the distribution of the total products of the economic means among the separate classes of a constitutional state, the so-called “capitalistic distribution,” from that prevailing in the feudal state.
All the more important economic schools coincide in finding the cause in this, that the supply of “free” laborers (i. e., according to Karl Marx politically free and economically without capital) perpetually exceeds the demand, and that hence there exists “the social relation of capital.” There “are constantly two laborers running after one master for work, and lowering, for one another, the wages”; and therefore the “surplus value” remains with the capitalist class, while the laborer never gets a chance to form capital for himself and to become an employer.