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It is enough that if the indefinite multiplication of man's wealth-producing power by inventive progress had been developed and distributed with any degree of intelligence for the general interest, poverty would have disappeared and comfort if not luxury have become the universal condition.
While we allow that the Christians underwent much persecution, there can be no doubt that the number of the sufferers has been grossly exaggerated. One can scarcely help suspecting that, as real martyrs were not forthcoming in as vast numbers as their supposed bones, martyrs were invented to fit the wealth-producing relics, as the relics did not fit the historical martyrs.
The machine is new, and it is an addition to the wealth-producing powers of the world, not because it embodies so much labour, but because it embodies so much labour directed in a new way; and it is only by means of the conditions which the possession of wage-capital enables the inventor or his partners to impose upon every one of the labourers that the machine, as a practical implement, comes into existence at all.
Here, then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale. We should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it above the level of actual bodily want.
"Leaving comparisons aside," I said, "the demagoguery and corruption of our public men would have been considered, in my day, insuperable objections to any assumption by government of the charge of the national industries. We should have thought that no arrangement could be worse than to entrust the politicians with control of the wealth-producing machinery of the country.
But men, who would be happy to become hardy pioneers in so many branches of wealth-producing activity, must remain idle because the owners of the soil, the mines and the factories prefer to invest their capital taken in the first place from the community in Turkish or Egyptian bonds, or in Patagonian gold mines, and so make Egyptian fellahs, Italian emigrants, and Chinese coolies their wage-slaves.
From being mere landholders whose possessions were confined mainly to city land, they became part owners of railroad, telegraph, express and other lines reaching throughout the country. So did their holdings and wealth-producing interests expand by a cumulative and ever-widening process.
Now, Harold, suppose you had merely been told as much as you have told us concerning the hundredfold multiplication of the wealth-producing power of the race which took place at this period, and were left, without further information, to infer for yourself how great a change for the better in the condition of mankind would naturally follow, what would it seem reasonable to suppose?"
His ministry, however, cannot be all top, a cloudland impalpable and fleeting. It was with common footing and vital ties that Goldsmith's village preacher Allured to brighter worlds and led the way. After such fashion and with thorough rootage in country life must the minister of today turn to spiritual account the wealth-producing methods of farming.
The real secret of the attraction which wealth has for those who create it lies in the fact that wealth is simply a form of power. These men are made conscious by experience, as less gifted men are not, that they can, by the exercise of their own mental energies, add indefinitely to the wealth-producing forces of the community.
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