derstand
all productive industries, and who, seeing what is permanently and
largely needed for human consumption and not abundantly supplied, or
what new industries can be started which will benefit the nation, what
new productions can be acclimatized, shall take charge of all the
laborers who wish to enlist in governmental employ for eight hours a
day, with such pay and rations as will be satisfactory and fair; and
if rightly managed, not only will their labor pay all costs of the
department, but it may be made to teach the country great industrial
lessons in agriculture and manufactures, by improvements which
scientific combined labor on a large scale may introduce; and if we
are anxious to make our country independent in all things, and
superior in manufactures, this is the very method in which it can be
done, by the instruction in the national establishments, which may be
the means of starting all manufactures that we need, far better than
the protective tariff which forces an unnatural growth _at an enormous
cost to the people_.

[2] Thousands of the women toiling in the cities on
starving wages, might be given in the Southern States
pleasant employment in fruit culture, and other light
agricultural labors.

There will then be no tramps, no paupers, no women compelled to sell
their persons; and as poverty, gloom, and hardship are the chief
sources of intemperance, we may anticipate, as another consequence, an
immense diminution of the liquor traffic, when the Department of
Productive Labor shall have gotten into full operation. Moral gloom
and the bad passions impel men to intemperance, and when they acquire
the happy and gentle temperament of woman they will also acquire her
temperance.

Mr. Bellamy's idea of the nation as the employer may not be
practicable, but the Department of Productive Labor is an obvious
method of initiating the principle of national co-operation, which an
urgent necessity has compelled the British government to initiate in
Ireland. But we cannot safely wait, like England, until famine is
threatening.

The pauperization of labor depends on the monopoly of land combined
with the monopoly of machinery. It cannot occur in a new country, but
must develop when all the land is monopolized and worth a hundred
dollars an acre. The independence of the laborer owing to cheap vacant
land is more than restored by a Department of Productive Labor which
establis