220 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



less than half of what it ought to produce and will pro- 

 duce—a system which drives the people away from 

 the country into the towns, and turns into paiipers men 

 who would, if they were permitted freely to use the 

 land on fair terms, produce an enormous increase of food, 

 the prime necessity of a nation's existence, and by their 

 prosperity cause such a demand for our manufactures 

 as we have never known in this country before. And 

 this evil is caused, and this good jjrevented, by the 

 direct or indirect action of landlords under our vicious 

 land system. 



I maintain, therefore, that these are the real funda- 

 mental causes of the depression of trade, because every one 

 of them, as I have shown, tends directly to the im- 

 poverishment of the great masses of the people, who are 

 our best customers. Every one of them can be shown 

 either to have begun about the period when the de- 

 pression showed itself, or to have become greatly in- 

 tensified about that period, and therefore as a whole they 

 have worked together to produce this enormous and long- 

 continued and increasing depression of trade. 



Remedies for the Depression of Trade. 



The remedies, of course, are some of them difficult, 

 some of them comparatively easy. If you see and under- 

 stand what I have endeavoured to make you see, that 

 anything like a system of foreign loans bolstered up 

 by the Government of this country is radically bad and 

 immoral, then you ought to urge upon your representa- 

 tives that in no way whatever should the Government 

 lend its power or its influence to compel the oppressed 

 populations to pay these loans or the interest upon 

 them. 



Another step will be to stop all aggressive wars on any 

 pretence whatever. I consider in the present state of the 

 world that there is only one class of wars that are 

 justifiable or will be justifiable for us, and that will be a 

 war to help a weak nation when oppressed by a stronger 

 power. It is a singular thing that this is the only kind of 



