CHAPTER XXI. 



THE PLUNDER OF THE EARTH CONCLUSION. 



Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, 

 The signet of its all-enslaving power, 

 Upon a shining ore, and called it GOLD; 

 Before whose image bow the vulgar great, 

 The vainly rich, the miserable proud, 

 The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, 

 Arid with blind feelings reverence the power 

 That grinds them to the dust of misery. 



Shelley. 



THE struggle for wealth, and its deplorable results, as 

 sketched in the preceding chapter, have been accompa- 

 nied by a reckless destruction of the stored-up products of 

 nature, which is even mdre deplorable because more irre- 

 trievable. Not only have forest-growths of many hun- 

 dreds of years been cleared away, often with disastrous 

 consequences, but the whole of the mineral treasures of 

 the earth's surface, the slow products of long-past eons 

 of time and geological change, have been and are still 

 being exhausted, to an extent never before approached, 

 and probably not equalled in amount during the whole 

 preceding period of human history. 



In our own country, the value of the coal exported to 

 foreign countries has increased from about three to more 

 than sixteen millions sterling per annum, the quantity 

 being now about thirty millions of tons; and this con- 

 tinuous exhaustion of one of the necessaries of existence 

 is wholly in the interest of landlords and capitalists, 



