If modern man’s food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a thousandfold greater than that of the caveman, why, then, are there 10,000,000 people in the United States to-day who are not properly sheltered and properly fed?  If the child of the caveman did not have to work, why, then, to-day, in the United States, are 80,000 children working out their lives in the textile factories alone?  If the child of the caveman did not have to work, why, then, to-day, in the United States, are there 1,752,187 child-labourers?

It is a true count in the indictment.  The capitalist class has mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging.  In New York City 50,000 children go hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1,320 millionaires.  The point, however, is not that the mass of mankind is miserable because of the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself.  Far from it.  The point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable, not for want of the wealth taken by the capitalist class, but for want of the wealth that was never created. This wealth was never created because the capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally.  The capitalist class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best of its management, but made the worst of it.  It is a management prodigiously wasteful.  This point cannot be emphasized too strongly.

In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the caveman, and that modern man’s food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a thousandfold greater than the caveman’s, no other solution is possible than that the management is prodigiously wasteful.

With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented, a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to labour more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of little luxuries to everybody.  There would be no more material want and wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no more men and women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts.  Not only would matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered.  In such a day incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach.  No man, woman, or child, would be impelled to action by an empty stomach.  On the contrary, they would be impelled to action as a child in a spelling match is impelled to action, as boys and girls at games, as scientists formulating law, as inventors applying law, as artists and sculptors painting canvases and shaping clay, as poets and statesmen serving humanity by singing and by statecraft.  The spiritual, intellectual, and artistic uplift consequent upon such a condition of society would be tremendous.  All the human world would surge upward in a mighty wave.