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