Capitalistic enterprise involves a ruthless belief in the importance of increasing material production to the utmost possible extent now and in the immediate future.  In obedience to this belief, new portions of the earth’s surface are continually brought under the sway of industrialism.  Vast tracts of Africa become recruiting grounds for the labor required in the gold and diamond mines of the Rand, Rhodesia, and Kimberley; for this purpose, the population is demoralized, taxed, driven into revolt, and exposed to the contamination of European vice and disease.  Healthy and vigorous races from Southern Europe are tempted to America, where sweating and slum life reduce their vitality if they do not actually cause their death.  What damage is done to our own urban populations by the conditions under which they live, we all know.  And what is true of the human riches of the world is no less true of the physical resources.  The mines, forests, and wheat-fields of the world are all being exploited at a rate which must practically exhaust them at no distant date.  On the side of material production, the world is living too fast; in a kind of delirium, almost all the energy of the world has rushed into the immediate production of something, no matter what, and no matter at what cost.  And yet our present system is defended on the ground that it safeguards progress!

It cannot be said that our present economic system is any more successful in regard to the other three objects which ought to be aimed at.  Among the many obvious evils of capitalism and the wage system, none are more glaring than that they encourage predatory instincts, that they allow economic injustice, and that they give great scope to the tyranny of the employer.

As to predatory instincts, we may say, broadly speaking, that in a state of nature there would be two ways of acquiring riches—­one by production, the other by robbery.  Under our existing system, although what is recognized as robbery is forbidden, there are nevertheless many ways of becoming rich without contributing anything to the wealth of the community.  Ownership of land or capital, whether acquired or inherited, gives a legal right to a permanent income.  Although most people have to produce in order to live, a privileged minority are able to live in luxury without producing anything at all.  As these are the men who are not only the most fortunate but also the most respected, there is a general desire to enter their ranks, and a widespread unwillingness to face the fact that there is no justification whatever for incomes derived in this way.  And apart from the passive enjoyment of rent or interest, the methods of acquiring wealth are very largely predatory.  It is not, as a rule, by means of useful inventions, or of any other action which increases the general wealth of the community, that men amass fortunes; it is much more often by skill in exploiting or circumventing others.  Nor is it only among the rich that our present rŽgime promotes a narrowly acquisitive spirit.  The constant risk of destitution compels most men to fill a great part of their time and thought with the economic struggle.  There is a theory that this increases the total output of wealth by the community.  But for reasons to which I shall return later, I believe this theory to be wholly mistaken.