Most important of all, however, it produces the potato, the beetroot and other vegetable sources of the carbo-hydrates from which alcohol is made. Alcohol, as a stimulant used to excess, interferes with the proper exercise of the wage-worker's labour-power, and this fact is being recognised by scientific students of industrial efficiency. Alcohol, as an industrial hindrance, will tend to disappear just as soon as the "disinterested" trade (and the "disinterested" newspapers that live on its advertisements) which insists on the right of the worker to have his pint, discovers that it can sell alcohol as profitably as a means to industrial efficiency. Already alcohol is figuring largely in the scheme of industry as a source of drugs, as a solvent in the manufacture of explosives, in making varnishes, starch and sugar, in treating rubber, in making dyes, photographic materials, and as a fuel. All this implies that alcohol and the alcohol-yielding vegetables, are becoming the raw material of the same industries as are supplied by the colliery and blast furnace and metal refining interests. This signifies that the industrial capitalisation of agriculture is at hand and that the landowning class (the agrarian capitalists) are about to merge still further with the industrial capitalist class. Capitalist production is about to sweep over into agriculture, to complete the submergence of the small undertaker therein, and to prove once more that time and tide justify Marx to the hilt.
Exploitation without End.
The application of steam-power and of iron and steel to the construction of sea-going ships, increased cargo-carrying capacity, speed, dock and harbour undertakings, etc., have made feasible the huge expansion of trans-oceanic traffic in commodities which has become so continuous and so efficient as to permit of the establishment of industrial and commercial concerns having their several processes of production and their departments of trade in different countries and even in sundered continents. These developments have enabled international production to grow out of international trade, and have afforded innumerable channels of investment in distant countries and virgin lands. Shipowners, merchant houses, finance corporations and foreign railways have branched out into almost every conceivable extension of profit-making venture. The merchants in the East, the rail-
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