mselves from the toil of making real
necessaries, they created in a never-ending series sham or artificial
necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-
Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which
supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious
mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system going."

"Yes--and then?" said I.

"Why, then, since 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 upon 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