196 MY LIFE 



precious metals ; and as the result of all this reckless exploiting 

 of nature's accumulated treasures has brought about over- 

 crowded cities reeking with disease and vice, and a population 

 which, though only one-half greater than our own, exhibits 

 all the pitiable phenomena of women and children working 

 long hours in factories and workshops, garrets and cellars, 

 for a wage which will not give them the essentials of mere 

 healthy animal existence ; while about the same proportion of 

 its workers, as with us, endure lives of excessive labour for a 

 bare livelihood, or constitute that crying disgrace of modern 

 civilization — willing men seeking in vain for honest work, and 

 forming a great army of the unemployed. 



What a demonstration is this of the utter folly and stupidity 

 of those blind leaders of the blind who impute all the evils 

 of our social system, all our poverty and starvation, to over- 

 population! Ireland, with half the population of fifty years 

 ago, is still poor to the verge of famine, and is therefore still 

 overpeopled. And for England and Scotland as well, the cry 

 is still, " Emigrate ! emigrate ! We are over peopled ! " But 

 what of America, with twenty-five times as much land as we 

 have, with even greater natural resources, and with a popu- 

 lation even more ingenious, more energetic, and more hard- 

 working than ours? Are they over-populated with only 

 twenty people to the square mile? There is only one rational 

 solution of this terrible problem. The system that allows the 

 land and the minerals, the means of communication, and all 

 other public services, to be monopolized for the aggrandise- 

 ment of the few — for the creation of millionaires — necessarily 

 leads to the poverty, the degradation, the misery of the many. 



There never has been, in the whole history of the human 

 race, a people with such grand opportunities for establishing 

 a society and a nation in which the products of the general 

 labour should be so distributed as to produce general well- 

 being. It wanted but a recognition of the fundamental prin- 

 ciple of " equality of opportunity," tacitly implied in the 

 Declaration of Independence. It wanted but such social 

 arrangements as would ensure to every child the best nurture, 

 the best training of all its faculties, and the fullest opportunity 



