"Why, then, once they had forced themselves to stagger along under this horrible burden of unnecessary production, it became impossible for them to look upon labour and its results from any other point of view than one--to wit, the ceaseless endeavour to expend the least possible amount of labour on any article made and yet at the same time to make as many articles as possible. To this `cheapening of production,' as it was called, everything was sacrificed: the happiness of the workman at his work, nay, his most elementary comfort and bare health, his food, his clothes, his dwelling, his leisure, his amusement, his education"--his life, in short--did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of `cheap production' of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all. Nay, we are told, and we must believe it, so overwhelming is the evidence, though many of our people scarcely _can_ believe it, that even rich and powerful men, the masters of the poor devils aforesaid, submitted to live amidst sights and sounds and smells which it is in the very nature of man to abhor and flee from, in order that their riches might bolster up this supreme folly. The whole community, in fact, was cast into the jaws of this ravening monster, `the cheap production' forced on it by the World-Market.""Dear me!" said I. "But what happened? Did not their cleverness and facility in production master this chaos of misery at last? Couldn't they catch up with the World-Market, and then set to work to devise means for relieving themselves from this fearful task of extra labour?"He smiled bitterly. "Did they even try to?" said he. "I am not sure.
You know that according to the old saw the beetle gets used to living in dung; and these people whether they found the dung sweet or not, certainly lived in it."His estimate of the life of the nineteenth century made me catch my breath a little; and I said feebly, "But the labour-saving machines?""Heyday!" quoth he. "What's that you are saying? the labour-saving machines? Yes, they were meant to `save labour' (or, to speak more plainly, the lives of men) on one piece of work in order that it might be expended--I will say wasted--on another, probably useless, piece of work. Friend, all their devices for cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour. The appetite of the World-Market grew with what it fed on: the countries within the ring of `civilisation' (that is organised misery) were glutted with the abortions of the market, and force and fraud were used unsparingly to `open up' countries _outside_ that pale. This process of `opening up'
is a strange one to those who have read the professions of the men of that period and do not understand their practice; and perhaps shows us at its worst the great vice of the nineteenth century, the use of hypocrisy and cant to evade the responsibility of vicarious ferocity.
