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3 > Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on

4 > which we pride ourselves to-day. Other millions, scattered through the

5 > globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in

6 > fifty years but ruins.

7 >

8 > There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common

9 > property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors,

10 > known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the

11 > invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

12 >

13 > Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase

14 > knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of

15 > scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never

16 > have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of

17 > scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of

18 > past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both

19 > physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all

20 > sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.

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22 [*"The Conquest of Bread"*](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/)

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24 *Pyotr Kropotkin (1842 - 1921)*

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