“The first reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European nations, are Thieves, and, in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’ goods, land, and fame.

But besides being Thieves, they are also fools, and have never yet been able to understand […] that the prosperity of their neighbours is, in the end, their own also; and the poverty of their neighbours, by the communism of God, becomes also in the end their own. ‘Invidia,’ jealousy of your neighbour’s good, has been, since dust was first made flesh, the curse of man; and ‘Charitas’, the desire to do your neighbor grace, the one source of all human glory, power, and material Blessing. […]

But occult theft, - theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly, - corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists – that is to say, people who live by percentages on the labour of others; instead of by fair wages for their own.”

Fors Clavigera (Letter Seven: Charitas, Denmark Hill, 1st July 1871)

John Ruskin‘s Initials