half-days' work a year will suffice to guarantee a perfectly comfortable
home.

There now remains clothing, the exact value of which is almost
impossible to fix, because the profits realized by a swarm of middlemen
cannot be estimated. Let us take cloth, for example, and add up all the
tribute levied on every yard of it by the landowners, the sheep owners,
the wool merchants, and all their intermediate agents, then by the
railway companies, mill-owners, weavers, dealers in ready-made clothes,
sellers and commission agents, and we shall get then an idea of what we
pay to a whole swarm of capitalists for each article of clothing. That
is why it is perfectly impossible to say how many days' work an overcoat
that you pay L3 or L4 for in a large London shop represents.

What is certain is that with present machinery it is possible to
manufacture an incredible amount of goods both cheaply and quickly.

A few examples will suffice. Thus in the United States, in 751 cotton
mills (for spinning and weaving), 175,000 men and women produce
2,033,000,000 yards of cotton goods, besides a great quantity of thread.
On the average, more than 12,000 yards of cotton goods alone are
obtained by a 300 days' work of nine and one-half hours each, say 40
yards of cotton in 10 hours. Admitting that a family needs 200 yards a
year at most, this would be equivalent to 50 hours' work, say _10
half-days of 5 hours each_. And we should have thread besides; that is
to say, cotton to sew with, and thread to weave cloth with, so as to
manufacture woolen stuffs mixed with cotton.

As to the results obtained by weaving alone, the official statistics of
the United States teach us that in 1870, if workmen worked 13 or 14
hours a day, they made 10,000 yards of white cotton goods in a year;
sixteen years later (1886) they wove 30,000 yards by working only 55
hours a week.

Even in printed cotton goods they obtained, weaving and printing
included, 32,000 yards in 2670 hours of work a year--say about 12 yards
an hour. Thus to have your 200 yards of white and printed cotton goods
_17 hours' work a year_ would suffice. It is necessary to remark that
raw material reaches these factories in about the same state as it comes
from the fields, and that the transformations gone through by the piece
before it is converted into goods are completed in the course of these
17 hours. But to _buy_ these 200 yards from the tradesman, a well-paid
workman must give _at the