xxxi] WASHINGTON TO SAN FRANCISCO 169 



fatal mistake of our Governments not to have seen this before 

 it has become too late, and the absurd and useless tariffs in 

 every colony have created insuperable difficulties to what 

 would at first have been natural and acceptable to all. His 

 view as to the general well-being of the people was, however, 

 fallacious. He looked at the world, just as our legislators 

 do, from the point of view of the employer and the capitalist, 

 not seeing that their prosperity to a large extent depended 

 on the presence of a mass of workers struggling for a bare 

 subsistence. At the very time of our interview the actual 

 fruit-grower could hardly earn the scantiest subsistence, 

 because he was dependent on the middlemen and railway 

 companies to get his crop to market, and because the very 

 abundance of the crop often so lowered prices as to make it 

 not pay to gather and pack. Since then, year by year, the 

 unemployed and the tramp have been increasing in California 

 as in the Eastern States, while San Francisco reproduces all 

 the phenomena of destitution, vice, and crime characteristic 

 of our modern great cities. But neither capitalists nor workers 

 yet see clearly that production for profit instead of for use 

 necessarily leads to those results. The latter class, however, 

 thanks to the socialists, are rapidly learning the fundamental 

 principle of social economy. When they have learnt it, the 

 beneficent and peaceful revolution will commence which will 

 steadily but surely abolish those most damning results of 

 modern (so-called) civilization — insanitary labour, degrading 

 over-work, involuntary unemployment, misery, and starvation 

 — among those whose labour produces that ever-increasing 

 wealth which their employers are proud of, and which their 

 rulers so criminally misuse. 



On returning to Stockton I went with my brother to 

 Santa Cruz, one of the health resorts on the Pacific coast 

 south of San Francisco, and thence to the forest tract of the 

 Coast Range, where are a few of the finest trees of the red- 

 wood left in Southern California. We stayed the night at the 

 hotel, and till the following afternoon, quite alone. The trees 

 themselves are more beautiful than those of the Sequoia 



