THE DECENTRALISATION OF INDUSTRIES. 39 



why the Scotch crofter and the Irish peasant, whose 

 obstinate labours in creating new productive soil out of 

 peat bogs are occasionally so much spoken of, are no 

 customers to the Lancashire weavers, the Sheffield 

 cutlers and the Northumbrian and Welsh pitmen ? Why 

 the Lyons weavers not only do not wear silks, but 

 sometimes have no food in their attics ? Why the 

 Russian peasants sell their corn, and for four, six, and 

 sometimes eight months every year are compelled to 

 mix bark and auroch grass to a handful of flour for 

 baking their bread ? Why famines are so common 

 amidst the growers of wheat and rice in India ? 



Under the present conditions of division into capi- 

 talists and labourers, into property-holders and masses 

 living on uncertain wages, the spreading of industries 

 over new fields is accompanied by the very same hor- 

 rible facts of pitiless oppression, massacre of children, 

 pauperism, and insecurity of life. The Russian Fabrics 

 Inspector's Reports, the Reports of the Plauen Handels- 

 kammer, and the Italian inquests are full of the same 

 revelations as the Reports of the Parliamentary Com- 

 missions of 1840 to 1842, or the modern revelations 

 with regard to the " sweating system " at Whitechapel 

 and Glasgow, and London pauperism. The Capital and 

 Labour problem is thus universal! sed ; but, at the same 

 time, it is also simplified. To return to a state of 

 affairs where corn is grown, and manufactured goods are 

 fabricated, for the use of those very people who grow 

 and produce them such will be, no doubt, the problem 

 to be solved during the next coming years of European 

 history. Each region will become its own producer 

 and its own consumer of manufactured goods. But 

 that unavoidably implies that, at the same time, it will 

 be its own producer and consumer of agricultural pro- 

 duce ; and that is precisely what I am going to discuss 

 next 



