saying? the labour-saving
machines? Yes, they were made 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. When the civilised
World-Market coveted a country not yet in its clutches, some transparent
pretext was found--the suppression of a slavery different from and not so
cruel as that of commerce; the pushing of a religion no longer believed
in by its promoters; the 'rescue' of some desperado or homicidal madman
whose misdeeds had got him into trouble amongst the natives of the
'barbarous' country--any stick, in short, which would beat the dog at
all. Then some bold, unprincipled, ignorant adventurer was found (no
difficult task in the days of competition), and he was bribed to 'create
a market' by breaking up whatever traditional society there might be in
the doomed country, and by destroying whatever leisure or pleasure he
found there. He forced wares on the natives which they did not want, and
took their natural products in 'exchange,' as this form of robbery was
called, and thereby he 'created new wants,' to supply which (that is, to
be allowed to live by their new masters) the hapless, helpless people had
to sell themselves into the slavery of hopeless toil so that they might
have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of 'civilisation.'
Ah," said the old man, pointing the dealings of to the Museum, "I have
read books and papers in there, telling strange stories indeed of
civilisation (or organised misery) with 'non-civilisation'; from the time
when the British Government deliberately sent blankets infected with
small-pox as choice gifts to inconvenient tribes of Red-skins, to the
time when Africa was infested