Competition, it is declared, is the life of trade; if this be true, it is truer that it is the death of labor, of the poorer classes.  For Great Britain has established herself in the markets of the world at the expense of her laboring classes.  While the capitalists of that country hold up their heads among the proudest people of the world, her laboring classes are absolutely ground to powder.  Because of the inhuman competition which her manufacturers have been led to adopt, and the introduction of improved labor-saving machinery, her balance of trade runs far into the millions of pounds, and political economists place their hands upon their hearts and declare that Great Britain is the most happy and prosperous country on the face of the globe.  But the declaration is illusory in the extreme.  No country can be happy and prosperous whose “mudsills” live in squalor, want, misery, vice and death.  If Great Britain is happy and prosperous, how shall we account for the constant strikes of labor organizations for higher pay or as a protest against further reduction of wages below which man cannot live and produce?  The balance of trade desire is the curse of the people of the world.  It can be obtained only by underbidding other people in their own markets; and this can be done only by the maximum of production at the minimum of cost—­by forcing as much labor out of the man or the machine as possible at the least possible expense.

There is death in the theory; death to our own people and death to the people with whom we compete.  When a people no longer produce those articles which are absolutely necessary to sustain life the days of such people may be easily calculated.

Men talk daily of “over production,” of “glutted markets,” and the like; but such is not a true statement of the case.  There can be no over production of anything as long as there are hungry mouths to be fed.  It does not matter if the possessors of these hungry mouths are too poor to buy the bread; if they are hungry, there is no overproduction.  With a balance of $150,000,000 of trade; with plethoric granaries and elevators all over the land; with millions of swine, sheep and cattle on a thousand hills; with millions of surplus revenue in the vaults of the National treasury, diverted from the regular channels of trade by an ignorant set of legislators who have not gumption enough to reduce unnecessary and burdensome taxation without upsetting the industries of the country—­with all its grandiloquent exhibition of happiness and prosperity, the laboring classes of the country starve to death, or eke out an existence still more horrible.

The factories of the land run on half time, and the men, women and children who operate them grow pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to satisfy the exactions of the landlord—­a monstrosity in the midst of civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our pretensions to civilization.