The Socialism of to-day

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 835096955

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-28834

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Laveleye, Émile de

Title:: The Socialism of to-day

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Field & Tuer

Year of publication:: 1884

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (XLIV, 331 S.)

Collection:: Economics Books

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s COLLECTIVISM AND LAND NATIONALIZATION. 2$/ with advancing wealth ” in all civilized communities. Thirty years ago, he says, he saw California in its infancy. There was little capital, no machines, no good roads, no large cities ; the settler inhabited a log-cabin ; but every one could make a living, and there were no beggars. To-day San Francisco is a wealthy town, where dwell millionnaires, and where their palaces rise in all directions. Capital is abundant and is accumulating with unprecedented rapidity ; meanwhile wages have fallen more than one-half, and in the streets lined with princely mansions, lit with gas, and thronged with liveried equipages, beggars wait tor the passer-by, and “the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals,” of whom Macaulay prophesied, become every day uiore numerous. Go where you may, the same contrast will strike you : where capital is most abundant, there also is the deepest poverty—look, for example, at London or Paris. In primitive communities, reckoned as poor, and where, in fact, capital is scarce, there is no great wealth, indeed, but there is no destitution. Economic history presents similar facts. Formerly, when all works were carried on by hand, Society, considered as a whole, was poor, but the labourer had work assured to him by which he could obtain a living. To-day machines produce useful articles in abundance and with marvel lous ease. The forest-tree is sawn into planks and transformed into doors or window-frames, without the touch of the hand of man, save to guide the engines which do the work. In cotton or woollen factories, the mule-jenny, tended by one workman, spins as much yarn as fifteen hundred workwomen could formerly have done. Cyclopean steam-hammers forge huge masses of steel, while mechanical contrivances of extreme delicacy make watches at a wonderfully small cost Augers "'ith diamond-points pierce the rocks. Gas, petroleum, elec- tricity, light us for almost nothing. Highly finished engines perform all agricultural operations ; while railways and steam- ships bear to us from the slopes of the Himalayas and from the far West the harvests of virgin soils. It is beyond dispute that human labour, aided by these powerful and marvellous machines, amply suffices to assure to ‘til the inhabitants of civilized countries the full satisfaction of

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