d otherwise have
been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years
before the proper time. Then again, consider the waste of time and
energy required to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would
do. There are a million or two of business firms in the country,
and five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and
rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and worrying,
the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the whole machinery
of the civil law made necessary by these processes; the libraries of
ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers
studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the hatreds
and lies! Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard
production of commodities--the factories closed, the workers idle,
the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the stock
manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the overstimulation of
others, for speculative purposes; the assignments and bank failures,
the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving populations!
Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile
trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent.
Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made
necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider
the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital energies;
consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material in the
piling of story upon story, and the burrowing underground! Then take
the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of administrative and
clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste--"

"I do not follow that," said the editor. "The Cooperative Commonwealth
is a universal automatic insurance company and savings bank for all its
members. Capital being the property of all, injury to it is shared
by all and made up by all. The bank is the universal government
credit-account, the ledger in which every individual's earnings and
spendings are balanced. There is also a universal government bulletin,
in which are listed and precisely described everything which the
commonwealth has for sale. As no one makes any profit by the sale, there
is no longer any stimulus to extravagance, and no misrepresentation; no
cheating, no adulteration or imitation, no bribery or 'grafting.'"

"How is the price of an article determined