But the distress that [ . . . ] shows itself now? The poverty that is so widespread? What, one asks, can all of your theorems prove versus appearances, versus experience? The state of emergency [characteristic] of our time is therefore supposed to arise from a discrepancy between population and production. Overpopulation is supposed to be imminent or already here. If this were the case, it would have to show up first in rising food prices. But, on the contrary, these are continuously sinking, and anxious farmers are already saying: improved agricultural systems are producing too much, and the population is not capable of consuming the fruits annually harvested. Hence, there is an abundance of food, and yet there are supposed to be too many people. Herein lies an outright contradiction. Yes, comes the reply, man needs more than bread, and the poor man is often unable to eke out the most basic necessities even with all this abundance and all the inexpensive prices. Thus we arrive at two completely different causes for the state of emergency: the greater artificial needs of the world of today and the smaller earnings of a portion of the population.
Even with all the reasons offered for today's misery, one cause that puts the phenomenon in an entirely different light has been emphasized only a little: namely, that not only has the population increased, but that recently a major portion of it has, in a sense, fully ascended to a position of natural consumption. [ . . . ]
Compare the position of a farmer or a burgher or a craftsman in our time with the situation of those who did their work among our ancestors, and one will soon recognize that, back then, a smaller number of people could live comfortably because the greater number was pressed down below the level of basic comforts whose satisfaction man, as man, is entitled to demand. Compare then and now, and one will stop complaining about a newly created poverty among these classes and [stop] attributing their cause to an oversized multitude; rather, one will be astonished by the dimensions of, and the infinite increase in, needs that production is able to satisfy. But even here I notice, as a premonition of things to come, that the possibility of endowing the majority of the people with their natural rights was itself determined by their endowment with these natural rights; that even here there was an interaction, that even here the most just procedure was the most useful, that freedom was the salvation. Slave labor remains slave labor; under certain circumstances, it can yield a greater net return for its lord and master, but it delivers a smaller gross volume to society. Free labor feeds a larger population. Property arouses a zeal for improvement. The certainty of bequeathing the fruits of one's labor to one's descendents leads to thrift, and the kind of glittering wealth that among a slave people is concentrated in the hands of a rich few is nothing compared with the bulk of capital that forms and is broadly distributed when there is a free, diligent, and industrious people.
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