prodigious strides. But the lot of the laborer had become worse. The worker’s earnings, since 1840, had only increased 25%, while the rents alone had increased 150%. Add to that the losses enumerated above, and then say whether such “national progress” is progress on the part of the producer or of the thief.
What the world’s money may amount to, and how it is distributed, can never be accurately known; but it is a certainty that it is steadily becoming concentrated into fewer hands. It has been estimated that twenty millionaires (out of a population of nearly 600,000,000), alone own wealth amounting to £145,000,000 (many authorities say much more); and the world’s coinage is said to be £1,190,000,000, and its total money, £1,946,000,000. If such is the case, it follows that 1/30,000,000 of the world’s population own wealth equal in value to 1/8 of its coinage, or 1/14 of its money. However that may be, these facts are certain: the world’s wealth is concentrating in fewer hands; millionaires and paupers are both on the increase; trade is increasingly dull, and employment becoming more scarce; employers are sending the workers adrift to starve; insolvencies are increasing, and the big capitalists are swallowing up the little ones; the Governments of the world are at the beck of its plutocrats; life is getting intolerable to the many and precarious to the few; homes are unhappy and woman and man alike wretched; discontent is everywhere, and even the most comfortable are beginning to ask whether life is worth living, and whether slavery, dependence, marriage, and the other institutions of our civilization are not failures after all.
That the present social system has failed must be apparent to all who have studied it. It has rendered the many subservient to the few; it has checked the best human endeavours, and facilitated every method of exploitation; it disinherits the great mass, and foreordains their lifelong misery before they are even born; it makes one man dependent upon another’s caprice, instead of making him dependent on his own energies; it is a premium to idleness, and an incentive to plunder; it is responsible for the bad morals of the many, who are the creatures of the vile surroundings in which it has placed them; it unites the sexes when the requirements of nature would set them apart, and keeps them apart when the healthiest impulses of their nature would have them together; it creates jealousies, hatreds, and mutual injustice. All our political institutions are destructive and reactionary; the opportunity to control the actions of one’s fellow, which lies at the base of every governmental system, tends surely and certainly to make those in power self-seeking, dishonest, and tyrannical, and ever ready to dominate and oppress those over whom they exert
