196 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



livelihood, while the railroad magnates and corn speculators 

 absorb the larger portion of the produce of their labour. 



What a terrible object-lesson is this as to the fundamental 

 wrong in modern societies which leads to such a result ! Here 

 is a country more than twenty-five times the area of the 

 British Islands, with a vast extent of fertile soil, grand 

 navigable waterways, enormous forests, a superabounding 

 wealth of minerals — everything necessary for the support 

 of a population twenty-five times that of ours — about fifteen 

 hundred millions — which has yet, in little more than a century, 

 destroyed nearly all its forests, is rapidly exhausting its 

 marvellous stores of natural oil and gas, as well as those 

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

 exploiting of nature's accumulated treasures has brought about 

 overcrowded cities reeking with disease and vice, and a popu- 

 lation which, though only one-half greater than our own, ex- 

 hibits 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 pro- 

 portion 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 starva- 

 tion, 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 population 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 



