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will, just as in the Old World, drive the small farmers out of competition, will reduce them to wages laborers, or overseers. Meanwhile the poor-rates, expenses for prisons, work-houses, the police, and the judiciary must go on increasing, while the number of laborers decreases who are able to support all the growing burdens of the state. Suppose now that the system of Capitalistic Production is carried through still more by the importation of half-starved and over-cheap Chinese, French Canadians, Poles, and Italians, who can live at 10 or 20 cents a day, having no families, or educational and civic institutions to support; why, consumption would still further be reduced, the reward of production will be diminished, and the wages class will be utterly impoverished and demoralized.
Let no small farmer imagine that he can stand any competition with great Capitalistic farming, except by special crops perhaps, such as flowers, fruit, berries, greens, grapes, milk, and the like. The experience made in this respect in the Old World is conclusive. So long as there is a well-to-do middle-class in the cities and industrial districts who can afford to pay handsomely for such dainties, the competition of large establishments on a rational basis will surely crush the small farmer. And have we not already warning examples to that effect in the New World? The flourishing butter and cheese industry of the small farmers of New York and New Jersey is now rapidly yielding to the monopoly of large establishments. In Louisiana it pays no longer to make one's sugar from one's own cane, the latter must be sold to the capitalist who makes the sugar and the price of the cane. The proceeds from the peach orchards of southern New Jersey and Delaware, etc., fall a prey to the speculators and railroad monopolies. The truck-farmers from Virginia down to Florida, and much more, their hands, are squeezed out by the same sort of gentry. The small milk farmers in the neighborhood of New York and Philadelphia are ruined by bad debts, or by the competition of the great dairies. All produce, especially which is liable to a rapid decay, is already at the mercy of speculators who buy up the market stalls of the cities, and monopolize all the means of conveyance, so as to leave the producers hardly a fourth-part of the selling retail price of such produce.
Now, all these developments have been the offshoot of Capitalistic Production within about fifteen years. And together with these have come all the whims of European prejudices and abuses, and the worst forms of demoralization. Our rich men keep liveried servants, and display a coat-of-arms painted on their coaches; they have fashion-able clubs, and ape servilely all the fashions of the aris-
