the form of advanced wages, it paid better to give them the little they
dared to ask than to stop gold-gathering to fight and crush them. But
now our customers have set up in their own countries improved copies of
our industrial organization, and have discovered places where iron
and coal are even handier than they are by this time in England. They
produce for themselves, or buy elsewhere, what they formerly bought
from us. Our profits are vanishing, our machinery is standing idle,
our workmen are locked out. It pays now to stop the mills and fight
and crush the unions when the men strike, no longer for an advance, but
against a reduction. Now that these unions are beaten, helpless, and
drifting to bankruptcy as the proportion of unemployed men in their
ranks becomes greater, they are being petted and made much of by our
class; an infallible sign that they are making no further progress in
their duty of destroying us. The small capitalists are left stranded by
the ebb; the big ones will follow the tide across the water, and
rebuild their factories where steam power, water power, labor power,
and transport are now cheaper than in England, where they used to be
cheapest. The workers will emigrate in pursuit of the factory, but they
will multiply faster than they emigrate, and be told that their own
exorbitant demand for wages is driving capital abroad, and must continue
to do so whilst there is a Chinaman or a Hindoo unemployed to underbid
them. As the British factories are shut up, they will be replaced by
villas; the manufacturing districts will become fashionable resorts for
capitalists living on the interest of foreign investments; the farms and
sheep runs will be cleared for deer forests. All products that can
in the nature of things be manufactured elsewhere than where they are
consumed will be imported in payment of deer-forest rents from foreign
sportsmen, or of dividends due to shareholders resident in England, but
holding shares in companies abroad, and these imports will not be paid
for by ex ports, because rent and interest are not paid for at all--a
fact which the Free Traders do not yet see, or at any rate do not
mention, although it is the key to the whole mystery of their opponents.
The cry for Protection will become wild, but no one will dare resort to
a demonstrably absurd measure that must raise prices before it raises
wages, and that has everywhere failed to benefit the worker. There will
be no employme