37
Having robbed the labourers wholesale of their labour, they proceed to rob one another by underselling, adulteration and fraud. As a general result of the system mere pecuniary relations are paramount. How to make money is the be-all and end-all of this ruinous system of competitive production for profit. Love, honour, ability, beauty, all are in the market—going, going, going, gone! knocked down to the highest bidder.
Art! that necessarily fades under such conditions; and machine-work, literally and figuratively, is the product of the time. This has been gradually brought about through the operation of the economical forms whose development has been briefly traced. Throughout the 18th century the idea that the making of goods is the end and aim of manufacture still struggled, with ever-increasing feebleness, against the real view of capitalism, that manufacture has no essential aim save profit for the capitalist-class, and mere occupation for the workman: occupation, that is, daily leisureless labour with no pretence to attractiveness in it, rewarded by a livelihood whose standard is forced down by competition to the lowest point which will be endured without active discontent.
This view is accepted as a matter past discussion by the fully-developed capitalism of the 19th century which has in its turn supplanted the workshop, with its groups of workmen each skilled in a narrow round of labour, by the factory with its machines tended by women and children or by a mere labourer of whom neither skill nor intelligence is necessarily required, This system with its unavoidable consequence that the greater and (commercially) more important part of the wares it
