xxin THE SOCIAL QUAGMIRE 407 



a very much wider range ; and the profit made will vary 

 still more than the produce, owing to much greater cost of 

 carriage to market in some cases than in others. It thus 

 happens that the variations in the cost of producing 

 and selling a bushel of wheat are, in the United States, 

 extremely large, perhaps larger than in any other part of 

 the world, because, in the first place, that cost is not 

 equalized by any general payment of rent for the land in 

 proportion to its better or worse quality ; and in the second 

 place, because capitalists have been allowed to acquire 

 enormous areas of land from which, by means of machinery 

 and a very little hired labour, they can make large profits 

 from a very small produce per acre. 



Some people will say that this result is a good one. 

 Bread is made cheap, and that benefits the whole com- 

 munity. This, however, is one of those utterly narrow 

 views by which capitalist writers delude the people. All 

 other things being equal, cheap bread is doubtless better 

 than dear ; but if cheap bread is only obtained through 

 the poverty or ruin of the bulk of those who grow it, and 

 if its value to most other workers is discounted by lower 

 wages or smaller earnings, both of which propositions are 

 in the present state of society demonstrably true, then 

 cheap bread is altogether evil. 



There are few better definitions of good government 

 than that it renders possible for all, and actually produces 

 in the great majority of cases, happy homes and a con- 

 tented people. Unless a number of the best writers of 

 American fiction, and a considerable proportion of those 

 who contribute to the most serious periodicals of the day, 

 are deluding their readers, the present system of cheap 

 bread-production is founded on privation, misery, or ruin 

 in the homes of thousands of farmers, and on the un- 

 natural growth of great cities, with a corresponding increase 

 of millionaires, of pauperism, and of crime. 



The Remedy. 



If the exposition now given of the causes of the suffer- 

 ings of the Western farmers is correct and I have the 



