I gave in the first chapter a brief outline of my view of the process of wealth-concentration. It is now time to consider the present status of affairs, and determine if we can exactly how near to completion our industrial machinery has come. Because of the vital part which the question of foreign markets has played and must play in our affairs, it is necessary that this inquiry should include a careful survey of conditions in the rest of the world.

The manufactures of the United States have grown from one hundred and ninety-eight million dollars in 1810, to five billion in 1890, and thirteen billion in 1900. Our exports to foreign countries increased from sixty-six million dollars in 1810 to eight hundred and fifty-six million in 1890, and a billion and half in 1905. Of course, if we could find unlimited markets abroad we might go on for half a century, or at least until our people grew tired of doing hard work for the rest of the world, and getting in return either bad debts, or else money to be used in building new machines to do more work of the same sort. But this is not the case, as it happens; there are half a dozen nations that have been building up industrial machines of their own, and have completed them; the meaning of the Socialist movements of England and Germany and France and Belgium and Italy is simply that all these nations are now able to manufacture more than their own people are able to buy, under the old deadly combination of a monopoly price and a competitive wage. And so when we go over to Europe to look for markets, we meet people who are coming over to look for markets among us; and when in our desperation we begin to sell out at any cost, the German capitalist cries out in protest, and the German workingmen are thrown on the streets, and the German Socialists increase their vote. And when the German capitalist retaliates and sells out at cost, our capitalists are checked, and our mills are stopped—and our Socialist vote goes up.

Look at the figures. England was the first in the field. The output of coal of Great Britain was one hundred and fifty million dollars in 1810; it was six hundred and sixty-five million dollars in 1878; in the same period the exports of manufactures rose from two hundred and thirty million dollars to one billion dollars. All that while, of course, England ruled the sea and had things her own way. In 1820 the value of all her manufactures was about seven billion dollars—equal to that of Germany and Austria combined, or to France and the United States combined, or to all the rest of the world, excluding these four nations. But then, little by little, the others began to catch up with her: in 1880, instead of manufacturing one-fourth of the world’s products, Great Britain manufactured one-fifth, and in 1894 she manufactured less than one-sixth. Between the years 1894 and 1902, British exports increased only thirteen per cent., while those of France increased sixteen per cent., those of Germany thirty-nine per cent., and those of the United States sixty-six per cent. The result was that a few years ago tens and hundreds of thousands of starving men were parading the streets of London, and all England was startled by Mr. Chamberlain’s announcement that the last hope of England was a tariff which would reserve for her the trade of the colonies! Of course England could not have made money by a tariff unless her colonies had consented to lose money; and the colonies were not planning to lose money—they were counting on making some by England’s tax on food. So the plan simply reduced itself to an invitation to the British workingman to pay more for his bread so that he could get starvation wages for doing the manufacturing of Canada and Australia and India. Is it any wonder that the reply to the proposal should have been an independent labour vote which sent a thrill of alarm through the nation?

And meanwhile Canada and Australia and India are straining every nerve to build up manufactures of their own! “No person connected with the cotton industry can be ignorant of the progress of cotton manufactures in India,” wrote the Textile Recorder in 1888. “Indian cotton piece-goods are coming to the front and displacing those of Manchester.” The Bombay Factory Commission of the same year recorded in Parliament how this was being done. “The factory engines are at work as a rule from 5:00 A. M. to 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00 P. M. In busy times it happens that the same set of workers remain at the gins and presses night and day, with half an hour’s rest in the evenings.” And, like India, Canada also puts duties on British goods to protect her own growing industries!

Meanwhile, also, the rest of the world is hard at work. Let us continue viewing that same industry of cotton-spinning. The value of the manufactured-cotton product of Austria has grown from fifteen million dollars in 1834, to thirty-five million dollars in 1860, and ninety millions in 1894. The textile manufactures of Belgium trebled themselves in three years previous to 1894; those of Germany have increased twenty-fold in sixty years; those of Italy nine-fold in twenty years, while even such backward countries as Russia and Spain have doubled their textile industries, one in thirty, the other in twenty years. Most unexpected and disconcerting of all, however, is Japan, who was once looked upon as a permanent customer, but whose home industries have been growing like a magic plant. The textile manufactures of Japan doubled in value in the three years between 1896 and 1899. From six million pounds of cotton spun in 1886, Japan advanced to ninety-one million in 1893, and to one hundred and fifty-three million in 1895, in nine years increasing twenty-four fold. The value of all her textile produce was six million dollars in 1887, and it was seventy million dollars in 1895. Therefore her imports of cotton goods from Europe fell from eight million dollars in 1884 to four million in 1895.

And while this was going on in the rest of the world, in the United States the value of manufactured cotton was rising from forty-five million dollars in 1840, to two hundred and ten million dollars in 1880, to two hundred and sixty-seven million dollars in 1890, and to three hundred and thirty-nine million in 1900! Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, the factories of Massachusetts and Canada were running on half-time, and dozens not running at all; that British cotton manufacturers found that prices had decreased fifteen per cent. in as many years; that the weavers of Belgium were starving, and the country was full of riots and insurrections; and that all the nations of Europe were gathering in the Far East like vultures about a carcass—knowing that the sole condition upon which any one of them could maintain its industrial and social régime for another decade, was its ability to secure the custom of some hundreds of millions of Chinamen, who are so poor that a handful of rice and a cotton shirt are all they own in the world!

I often wonder what our college presidents and other after-dinner economists make of facts such as these. They do not discuss them in their speeches. I am acquainted with only one man among all our orthodox advisers who believes in the permanence of the competitive régime, and at the same time really understands what it is and what it implies—who cares for the truth, follows his views to their conclusions, and then speaks the conclusions. When I first became acquainted with this gentleman—intellectually acquainted, that is—it affected me painfully, and even now the sight of his book gives me internal sensations akin to those of a man in an ascending elevator which comes to a sudden halt.

The book is “The New Empire,” and the author is Mr. Brooks Adams. He writes coldly and dispassionately, and with the certainty of the man of science, whose conclusions may not be disputed. His style is characteristic; it is brief and to the point, and there are no apologies.

Mr. Adams is the apostle of competition. He explains that he is this, not from choice but from necessity. “Very probably keen competition is not a blessing. We cannot alter our environment. Nature has cast the United States into the vortex of the fiercest struggle ever known.” His theory of life Mr. Adams condenses as follows: “For the purpose of obtaining a working hypothesis it is assumed that men are evolved from their environment like other animals, and that their intellectual, moral, and social qualities may be investigated as developments from the struggle for life.... Food is the first necessity, but as most regions produce food more or less abundantly, the pinch lies not so much in the existence of the food itself as with its distribution.... To satisfy their hunger men must not only be able to defend their own, but, in case of dearth, to rob their neighbours, where they cannot buy, for the weaker must perish.... Life may be destroyed as effectually by peaceful competition as by war. A nation which is undersold may perish by famine as completely as if slaughtered by a conqueror.... For these reasons men have striven to equip themselves well for the combat, and since the end of the Stone Age no nation in the more active quarters of the globe has been able to do so without a supply of relatively cheap metal.... Thus the position of the mines has influenced the direction of travel. The centre of the mineral production is likely to be the seat of empire. I believe it is impossible to overestimate the effect upon civilisation of the variation of trade routes. According to the ancient tradition, the whole valley of the Syr-Daria was once so thickly settled that a nightingale could fly from branch to branch of different trees, and a cat walk from wall to wall and from housetop to housetop, from Kashgar to the Sea of Aral.” But the trade route across central Asia was displaced, “and so it has come to pass that Bagdad has sunk into a mass of hovels, and the valley of Syr-Daria is a wilderness. The fate of the empire of Haroun-al-Raschid exemplifies an universal law.”

“The greatest prize of modern times,” in Mr. Adams’s opinion, is northern China, and upon this the fate of empire rests. His book was published in 1901, and he considered then that the chances were all with the United States. Ten years before we had been “tottering upon the brink of ruin.... Relief came through an exertion of energy and adaptability, perhaps without a parallel.... In three years America reorganised her whole social system by a process of consolidation, the result of which has been the so-called trust. But the trust is in reality the highest type of administrative efficiency, and therefore of economy, which has as yet been attained. By means of this consolidation the American people were enabled to utilise their mines to the full.... The shock of the impact of the new power seems overwhelming.... In March, 1897, Pittsburg achieved supremacy in steel, and in an instant Europe felt herself poised above an abyss.... The Spanish Empire disintegrated, and Great Britain displayed a lassitude which has attracted the attention of the entire world.... Germany has also been perturbed.... Russia has, however, suffered most.

“The world seems agreed that the United States is likely to achieve, if indeed she has not already achieved, an economic supremacy. The vortex of the cyclone is near New York. No such activity prevails elsewhere; nowhere are undertakings so gigantic, nowhere is administration so perfect; nowhere are such masses of capital centralised in single hands. And as the United States becomes an imperial market, she stretches out along the trade routes which lead from foreign countries to her heart, as every empire has stretched out from the days of Sargon to our own. The West Indies drift toward us, the Republic of Mexico hardly longer has an independent life, and the City of Mexico is an American town. With the completion of the Panama Canal all Central America will become a part of our system. We have expanded into Asia, we have attracted the fragments of the Spanish dominions, and reaching out into China, we have checked the demands of Russia and Germany, in territory, which, until yesterday, had been supposed to be beyond our sphere. We are penetrating Europe, and Great Britain especially is assuming the position of a dependency, which must rely upon us as the base from which she draws her food in peace, and without which she could not stand in war.”

“Supposing the movement of the next fifty years only equal to that of the last,” continues our author, ... “the United States will outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined. The whole world will pay her tribute. Commerce will flow to her, both from east and west, and the order which has existed from the dawn of time will be reversed.”

There is only one peril about all this, in the opinion of Mr. Adams. “Society is now moving with intense velocity, and masses are gathering bulk with proportional rapidity. There is also some reason to surmise that the equilibrium is correspondingly delicate and unstable. If so apparently slight a cause as a fall of prices for a decade has been sufficient to propel the seat of empire across the Atlantic, an equally slight derangement of the administrative functions of the United States might force it across the Pacific. Prudence therefore would dictate the adoption of measures to minimise the likelihood of sudden shocks.... If the New Empire should develop, it must be an enormous complex mass, to be administered only by means of a cheap, elastic and simple machinery; an old and clumsy mechanism must, sooner or later, collapse, and in sinking may involve a civilisation.”

By “an old and clumsy mechanism” Mr. Adams explains elsewhere that he means our American political system. Our ancestors were opposed to much consolidation, and they formed a constitution that was practically unchangeable, because they believed they had “reached certain final truths of government.” “The language of the Declaration of Independence, in which they proclaimed one of these truths (that all men are created equal), varies little from that of a Catholic council,” says Mr. Adams. An American is apt to believe such formulas, being “dominated by tradition.” But a modern thinker views them “as having no necessary relation to the conduct of affairs in the twentieth century.” “If men are to be observed scientifically, the standard by which customs and institutions must be gauged cannot be abstract moral principles, but success.... Institutions are good when they lead to success in competition, and bad when they hinder.”

The United States now forms a “gigantic and growing empire. She occupies a position of extraordinary strength. Favoured alike by geographical position, by deposits of minerals, by climate, and by the character of her population, she has little to fear either in peace or war, from rivals, provided the friction created by the movement of the masses with which she has to deal does not neutralise her energy.”...

“The alternative presented is plain. We may cherish ideals and risk substantial benefits to realise them. Such is the emotional instinct. Or we may regard our government dispassionately, as we would any other matter of business.... The United States has become the heart of the economic system of the age, and she must maintain her supremacy by wit and force, or share the fate of the discarded. What that fate is the following pages tell.... With conservative populations slaughter is nature’s remedy.”

Never in my life shall I forget the hours in which I wrestled with these problems—the weeks and the months of perplexity and despair. It happened long before I ever heard of Mr. Adams—for of course these thoughts of his are the thoughts of the time, there is a whole literature of them, from Kipling, Roosevelt, and the Kaiser down. And to look back over the weary wastes of history—the blind, hideous nightmare of blood and tears—and then to look forward, and in all the future see nothing else! To see never any rest for agonised humanity, only kill or be killed for ages upon ages! To see this newest and noblest effort of man after freedom and peace—the American Republic—turned into an engine of slaughter and oppression! To be shown by cold, scientific formulas that my reverence for the traditions of Lincoln was merely an “emotional impulse,” and that the end of it could only be that my country would share “the fate of the discarded!” I could not believe it—I cried out in the night-time for deliverance from it.

^[1]There is a certain relentlessness about Mr. Adams, which fills the reader with rebellion, and makes him think. The average imperialist carefully avoids doing this; he veils his doctrines with moral phrases, with the decent pretence of “destiny” at the very least. But Mr. Adams dances a very war-dance upon the thing called “moral sense”—never before was it made to seem such an impertinent superfluity.

Have you, the reader, never had one smallest doubt? Does it not, for instance, seem strange to you now, when you think of it, that this mighty people cannot stay quietly at home and live their own life and mind their own affairs? How does it happen that our existence as a nation depends upon expansion? Is it that our population is growing so fast? But here is our Imperialist President lamenting that our population is not growing fast enough! And so we have to fight to find room for our children; and we have to have more children in order that we may be able to fight! We deplore race suicide, and we give as our reason that it prevents race-murder!

Picture to yourself half a dozen men on an island. If the island be fertile they can get along without any foreign trade, can they not? And then why cannot a nation do it? According to Mulhall, in 1894 two millions of our agricultural labourers were raising food for foreign countries. And all our imports are luxuries, save a few things such as tea and coffee and some medicines! And still our existence as a nation depends upon foreign trade—trade with Filipinos and Chinamen, with Hottentots and Esquimaux! Why?

Can you, the reader, tell me? We manufacture more than we can use, you say. Unless we can sell the balance to the Chinamen some of our factories must close down, and then some of our people would starve. But why, I ask, cannot our own starving people have the things that go abroad—some of all that food that goes abroad, for instance? Why is it that the Chinamen come first and our own people afterwards? Until we have made some things for the Chinamen, you explain, we have no money to buy anything ourselves. And so always the Chinamen first. It seems such a strange, upside-down arrangement—does it not seem so to you? For, look you, the people of England are in the same fix, and the people of Germany are in the same fix—the people of all the competing nations are in the same fix! They actually have to go to war to kill each other, in order to get a chance to sell something to the Chinamen, so that they can get money to buy some things for themselves! They were actually doing that in Manchuria for eighteen months! More amazing yet, they had to go and murder some of the Chinamen, in order to compel the rest to buy something, so that they could get money to buy something for themselves!

How long can it be possible for a human being, with a spark of either conscience or brains in him, to gaze at such a state of affairs and not know that there is something wrong about it? And how long could he gaze before the truth of it would flash over him—that the reason for it is that some private party owns all the machinery and materials of production, and will not give the people anything, until they have first made something that can be sold! That all the world lies at the mercy of those who own the materials and machinery, and who leave men to starve when they cannot make profits! And that this is why we Americans cannot stay at home and be happy, but are forced to go trading with Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux, and competing for “empire” with our brothers in England and Germany and Japan!

If the reader be an average American, these thoughts will be new to him. He has been brought up on a diet of misunderstood Malthusianism. He is told that life has always been a struggle for existence and always will be; that there is not food enough to go round, and that therefore, every now and then, the surplus population has to be cut down by famine and war. It is to be pointed out concerning the doctrine that, while he swears allegiance to it, he doesn’t like to think about it, and when it comes to the practical test he shows that he does not really believe it. Whenever famine comes, he subscribes to a grain-fund, and does his best to defeat nature; when war comes, he gets up a Red Cross Society for the same purpose. And yet he still continues to swear by this wiping out of the nations, and any discussion about abolishing poverty he waves aside as Utopian.

The writer may fail in his purpose with this paper, but he will not have written in vain if he can lead a few men to see the pitiful folly of that half-baked theory which ranks men with the wild beasts of the jungle, and ignores the existence of both science and morality. He can do that, assuredly, with any one whom he can induce to read one little book—Prince Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories and Workshops.”

The book was published nine years ago, but apparently it has not yet had time to affect the cogitations of the orthodox economists. You still read, as you have been used to reading since the days of Adam Smith, that the possibilities of the soil are strictly limited, and that population always stays just within the starvation limit. Nearly all the fertile land in this country, for instance, is now in use, and so we shall soon reach the limit here. The forty million people of Great Britain have long since passed it, and they would starve to death were it not for our surplus. And there are portions of the world where population is even more dense, as in Belgium. All this you have known from your school-days, and you think you know it perfectly, and beyond dispute; and so how astonished you will be to be told that it is simply one of the most stupid and stupefying delusions that ever were believed and propagated among men; that the limits of the productive possibilities of the soil have not only not been attained, but are, so far as science can now see, absolutely unattainable; that not only could England support with ease her own population on her own soil, and not only could Belgium do it, but any most crowded portion of the world could do it, and do it once again, and yet once again, and do it with two or three hours of work a day by a small portion of its population! That England could now support, not merely her thirty-three million inhabitants, but seventy-five and perhaps a hundred million! And that the United States could now support a billion and a quarter of people, or just about the entire population of this planet! And that this could be done year after year, and entirely without any possibility of the exhaustion of the soil! And all this not any theory of a closet speculator or a Utopian dreamer, but by methods that are used year after year by thousands and tens of thousands of men who are making money by it in all portions of the world—in the market-gardens of Paris and London, of Belgium, Holland and the island of Jersey, the truck-farms of Florida and Minnesota, and of Norfolk, Virginia!

Prince Kropotkin writes:

“While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of nature and a legion of workers, whose very names will remain unknown to posterity, have created of late a quite new agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior to the old three-fields system of our ancestors. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops every three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land every twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it; otherwise, it would raise up the levels of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass to the acre, as we do, but from fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same space; not twenty-five dollars’ worth of hay, but five hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables, of the plainest description, cabbages and carrots. That is where agriculture is going now.”

The writer tells about all these things in detail. Here is the culture maraîchere of Paris—a M. Ponce, with a tiny orchard of two and seven-tenths acres, for which he pays five hundred dollars rent a year, and from which he takes produce that could not be named short of several pages of figures: twenty thousand pounds of carrots, twenty thousand of onions and radishes, six thousand heads of cabbage, three thousand of cauliflower, five thousand baskets of tomatoes, five thousand dozen choice fruit, one hundred and fifty-four thousand heads of “salad”—in all, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of vegetables. Says the author:

“The Paris gardener not only defies the soil—he would grow the same crops on an asphalt pavement—he defies climate. His walls, which are built to reflect light and to protect the wall-trees from the northern winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his pépinières, have made a rich Southern garden out of the suburbs of Paris.”

The consequence of this is that the population of the districts of that city, three millions and a half of people, could, if it were necessary, be maintained in their own territory, provided with food both animal and vegetable, from a piece of ground less than sixty miles on a side! And at the same time, by the same methods, they are raising thirty tons of potatoes on an acre in Minnesota, and three hundred and fifty bushels of corn in Iowa, and six hundred bushels of onions in Florida. And with machinery, on the prairie wheat-farms, they raise crops at a cost which makes twelve hours and a half of work of all kinds enough to supply a man with the flour part of his food for a year! And then, as if to cap the climax, comes Mr. Horace Fletcher with his discovery that all the ailments of civilised man, (including old age and death) are due to overeating; and Professor Chittenden with his practical demonstration that the quantity of food needed by man is about four-tenths of what all physiologists have previously taught! ^[2]And while all this has been going on for a decade, while encyclopedias have been written about it, our political economists continue to discuss wages and labour, rent and interest, exchange and consumption, from the standpoint of the dreary, century-old formula that there must always be an insufficient supply of food in the world!

Such is the state of affairs with agriculture: and now how is it with everything else? In the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labour (1898), Carroll D. Wright has figured the relative costs of doing various pieces of work by hand and by modern machinery. Here are a few of the cases he gives:

“Making of 10 plows: By hand, 2 workmen, performing 11 distinct operations, working a total of 1,180 hours, and paid $54.46. By machine, 52 workmen, 97 operations, 37½ hours, $7.90.

“Making of 500 lbs. of butter: By hand, 3 men, 7 operations, 125 hours, $10.66. By machine, 7 men, 8 operations, 12½ hours, $1.78.

“Making of 500 yds. twilled cottonade: By hand, 3 men, 19 operations 7,534 hours, $135.61. By machine, 252 men, 43 operations, 84 hours, $6.81.

“Making of 100 pairs of cheap boots: By hand, 2 workmen, 83 operations, 1,436 hours, $408.50. By machine, 113 workmen, 122 operations, 154 hours, $35.40.”

Thus we see human labour has been cut to the extent of from eighty to ninety-five per cent. From other sources I have gathered a few facts about the latest machinery. In Pennsylvania, some sheep were shorn and the wool turned into clothing in six hours, four minutes. A steer was killed, its hide tanned, turned into leather and made into shoes in twenty-four hours. The ten million bottles used by the Standard Oil Company every year are now blown by machinery. An electric riveting-machine puts rivets in steel-frame buildings at the rate of two per minute. Two hundred and sixty needles per minute, ten million match-sticks per day, five hundred garments cut per day—each by a machine tended by one little boy. The newest weaving-looms run through the dinner hour and an hour and a half after the factory closes, making cloth with no one to tend them at all. The new basket-machine invented by Mergenthaler, the inventor of the linotype, is now in operation everywhere, “making fruit-baskets, berry-baskets and grape-baskets of a strength and quality never approached by hand labour. Fancy a single machine that will turn out completed berry-baskets at the rate of twelve thousand per day of nine hours’ work! This is at the rate of one thousand three hundred per hour, or over twenty baskets a minute! One girl, operating this machine, does the work of twelve skilled hand operators!”

Since all these wonders are the commonplace facts of modern industry, it is not surprising that here and there men should begin to think about them; here is the naïve question recently asked by the editor of a Montreal newspaper which I happened on:

“With the best of machinery at the present day, one man can produce woollens for three hundred people. One man can produce boots and shoes for one thousand people. One man can produce bread for two hundred people. Yet thousands cannot get woollens, boots and shoes, or bread. There must be some reason for this state of affairs.”

There is a reason, a perfectly plain and simple reason, which all over the world the working-people, whom it concerns, are coming to understand. The reason is that all the woollen manufactories, the boot and shoe and bread manufactories, and all the sources of the raw materials of these, and all the means of handling and distributing them when they are manufactured, belong to a few private individuals instead of to the community as a whole. And so, instead of the cotton-spinner, the shoe-operative and the bread-maker having free access to them, to work each as long as he pleases, produce as much as he cares to, and exchange his products for as much of the products of other workers as he needs, each one of these workers can only get at the machines by the consent of another man, and then does not get what he produces, but only a small fraction of it, and does not get that except when the owner of the balance can find some one with money enough to buy that balance at a profit to him!

Prof. Hertzka, the Austrian economist, in his “Laws of Social Evolution,” has elaborately investigated the one real question of political economy to-day, the actual labour and time necessary for the creation, under modern conditions, of the necessaries of life for a people. Here are the results for the Austrian people, of twenty-two million:

“It takes 26,250,000 acres of agricultural land, and 7,500,000 of pasturage, for all agricultural products. Then I allowed a house to be built for every family, consisting of five rooms. I found that all industries, agriculture, architecture, building, flour, sugar, coal, iron, machine-building, clothing, and chemical production, need 615,000 labourers employed 11 hours per day, 300 days a year, to satisfy every imaginable want for 22,000,000 inhabitants.

“These 615,000 labourers are only 12.3 per cent. of the population able to do work, excluding women and all persons under 16 or over 50 years of age; all these latter to be considered as not able.

“Should the 5,000,000 able men be engaged in work, instead of 615,000, they need only to work 36.9 days every year to produce everything needed for the support of the population of Austria. But should the 5,000,000 work all the year, say 300 days—which they would probably have to do to keep the supply fresh in every department—each one would only work 1 hour and 22½ minutes per day.

“But to engage to produce all the luxuries, in addition, would take, in round figures, 1,000,000 workers, classed and assorted as above, or only 20 per cent. of all those able, excluding every woman, or every person under 16 or over 50, as before. The 5,000,000 able, strong male members could produce everything imaginable for the whole nation of 22,000,000 in 2 hours and 12 minutes per day, working 300 days a year.”

But then you say: If this be true, if two hours’ work will produce everything, how can everybody go on working twelve hours forever? They can’t; and that is just why I am writing this book. They can do it only until they have filled the needs, first of themselves, then of all the Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux who have money to buy anything—and then until they have filled all the factories, warehouses and stores of the country to overflowing. Then they cannot do one single thing more; then they are out of work. They can go on so long as their masters can find a market in which to sell their product at a profit; then they have to stop. And then suddenly (instantly, God help them!) they have to take their choice between two alternatives—between an Industrial Republic, and a political empire. Either they will hear Prince Kropotkin, or they will hear Mr. Brooks Adams. Either they will take the instruments and means of production and produce for use and not for profit; or else they will forge themselves into an engine of war to be wielded by a military despot. In that case, they will fling themselves upon China and Japan, and seize northern China, “the greatest prize of modern times.” They will enter upon a career of empire, and by the wholesale slaughter of war they will keep down population, while at the same time by the wholesale destruction of war they keep down the surplus of products. So there will be more work for the workers for a time, and more profits for the masters for a time; until what wealth there is in northern China has also been concentrated and possessed, when once more there will begin distress. By that time, however, we shall have an hereditary aristocracy strongly intrenched, and a proletariat degraded beyond recall; so that our riots will end in mere slaughter and waste, and we shall never again see freedom. We shall run then the whole course of the Roman Empire—of frenzied profligacy among the wealthy, and beastly ferocity among the populace: until at last we fall into imbecility, and are overwhelmed by some new, clean race which the strong heart of nature has poured out.

Empires have risen and have fallen; but it has not been, as Mr. Adams asserts, because of “variations of trade routes,” but solely because of wealth-concentration, with its ensuing corruption, ignorance and brutality among the populace, and avarice and luxury among the rich. Let the reader take Froude’s “Cæsar,” and read, in the first chapter, his picture of the last days of the Roman Republic:

“An age in so many ways the counterpart of our own, the blossoming period of the old civilisation, when the intellect was trained to the highest point that it could reach, and on the great subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art, even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material progress and material civilisation; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner-parties, or senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. The highest offices of state were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they were confined, in fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most ready use of the tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had been exchanged for distinctions of wealth. The struggles between plebeians and patricians for equality of privilege were over, and a new division had been formed between the party of property and a party that desired a change in the structure of society. The free cultivators were disappearing from the soil. Italy was being absorbed into vast estates, held by a few favoured families and cultivated by slaves, while the old agricultural population was driven off the land, and was crowded into towns. The rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest, except for its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes was to obtain money without labour, and to spend it in idle enjoyment. Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendancy of the party which would maintain the existing order of things, or would overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good things which alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated in their hearts disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed. Public men spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any serious meaning there was none remaining beyond the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude.”

Is not this a parallel to make one pause and think? And if our American republic is to escape the fate of Rome, to what cause will it be due? The Roman failure was due to the fact that “the men and women by whom the hard work of the world was done were chiefly slaves”; those who held the franchise, the free Roman citizens, were a comparatively small class, and the patricians bought them with “bread and circuses,” and so held the reins of power. In our present time, however, those who do the work and those who have the ballot are the same class; and also they have the public school and the press, and the whole of modern science at their backs. More important yet—the all-dominating fact—is the machine. The Roman chattel-slave worked with his hands, while the modern wage-slave works with tools of gigantic speed and power; which means that our modern economic process, while infinitely more cruel and destructive, makes up for these qualities by the certainty and swiftness with which it rushes to its end. So it is that a Revolution which in Rome took centuries to culminate and fail, will require only decades in America to accomplish its inevitable triumph.