profit out of your labors? Free trade, indeed? No: there is no Government which affords Protection to labor, or allows it facilities to enjoy Free Trade; they all exist to enforce the very reverse of these things, by fostering Monopoly and Exploitation. The Australasian Governments tax an annual revenue of £15,000,000 from the working people of these colonies, and expend £20,000,000 in the same time, leaving the laborers a deficit of £5,000,000 to be met with loans payable with interest. The expenditure in 53 years (1830-82) was £420,000,000, and the revenue collected only £315,000,000, leaving labor indebted for the sum of £105,000,000, owing for nothing at all. All public debts are fictitious obligations which are owed by labor to idleness. The National Debt of Australasia in 1882, was £97,000,000,—equal to £34 per inhabitant owing to the usurers for no services rendered. It was also equal to 16% of the total wealth of the colonies, and paid interest at the rate of 4 7/10 % or 3 1/2% of the total income. All these so-called “debts,” and all the loans we receive from the usurers, may be demanded in gold when the time comes for their repayment; but of course the demand could never be met: the National Debt alone is more than seven times the amount of gold we possess. So the only way these bogus debts can be met is by borrowing fresh loans to pay them with; and these, of course, bear interest and grow eternally,—while the bankers live in idleness and affluence on the products which they filch from labor in the name of interest.
The worker’s indebtedness to the idler is getting worse and worse as time goes on. England’s experience in the last half-century shows what will be the certain fate of the civilized world if some remarkable change does not take place in the nature of our social system. There the worker’s lot has steadily got worse. Between 1837 and 1887, the population of the United Kingdom increased 42%, and had other things remain relatively equal they would have shown a like increase. But such was not the case. While the increase in population during the half-century[1] was but 42%, the revenue had increased 73%; or in other words, the worker’s burden of taxation had become 31% harder to bear. And yet the country as a whole had become proportionally 82% wealthier. But it need not be wondered at that the laborer’s condition did not advance, considering that the trade, resting as it did on profit-plundering, had grown to be 430% more extensive (still allowing for the increased trade due to increased population); and the banking transactions, which all the time were plundering the laborers, had made an advance of 530% in excess of the advance of population! Everything in the way of labor’s exploitation had advanced with
- ↑ See Mulhall’s Fifty Years’ National Progress.
