use that capital for their, own profit, the working class produces far more than it consumes. Indeed, the working class in capitalist society produces far more than all classes can consume. Though they be madly extravagant, the propertied class of economically advanced countries like Britain and America, have no need for the mass of surplus commodities remaining after every conceivable requirement is satisfied. Competition between the workers for employment at wages, restricts their effective demand for commodities to narrow limits. This ever increasing surplus of unconsumed wealth in capitalist communities, side by side with the persistence of poverty, is the characteristic distinguishing the society of to-day from all forms of social organisation in the past. The motive directing the use of the instruments of production is the desire for profit. Unless the sale of the surplus product can be effected, profit cannot be realised. The home market is already satisfied. Though millions may want some of the commodities composing the surplus product, those millions belong to the working class. As they have no more money available for purchases, they drop out of the capitalist market. Their labour made the goods, but the goods are the property of their masters. With every development of technique and industrial efficiency, capitalism increasingly depends upon the foreign market. The market abroad is as necessary for the acquisition of profit by the capitalist, as the labour of the workers at home. A foreign or colonial market having produce of its own, offered in exchange for the products of Lancashire or Birmingham, is of no service in absorbing the surplus product. Foreign markets of that order, pursuing trade as understood in the era of Free Trade Liberalism, are still essential to the capitalist economy. But the disposal of the ever accumulating surplus produced by the titanic forces of current capitalism, demand markets that are absolute absorbents of the wealth that finds no use in the place of manufacture.
BRITAIN CHALLENGED.
At the end of the eighteenth century the exportation of manufactured goods by Britain assumed great dimensions. Th great inventions that transformed methods in the textile trades, thee application of steam power to industry, the demand for coal, made Britain the first among the nations to apply the moder processes of production. Britain became
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