The Exterminating Machines
instance. The result is there's too many at it, and there aint enough work to keep 'em all goin'.'
'Yes,' cried Crass, eagerly, 'that's just what I say. Machinery is the real cause of all the poverty. That's what I said the other day.'
'Machinery is undoubtedly the cause of unemployment,' replied Owen, 'but it's not the cause of poverty: that's another matter altogether.'
The others laughed derisively.
'Well, it seems to me to amount to the same thing,' said Harlow, and nearly everyone agreed.
'It doesn't seem to me to amount to the same thing,' Owen replied. 'In my opinion we are all in a state of poverty even when we have employment. The condition we are reduced to when we're out of work is more properly described as destitution.'
'Poverty,' continued Owen, after a short silence, 'consists in a shortage of the necessaries of life. When those things are so scarce or so dear that people are unable to obtain sufficient of them to satisfy all their needs, they are in a condition of poverty. If you think that the machinery which makes it possible to produce all the necessaries of life in abundance is the cause of the shortage, it seems to me that there must be something the matter with your minds.'
'Oh, of course we're all bloody fools except you,' snarled Crass. 'When they was servin' out the sense they give you such a 'ell of a lot there wasn't none left for nobody else.'
'If there wasn't something wrong with your minds,' continued Owen, 'you would be able to see that we might have "Plenty of Work" and yet be in a state of destitution. The miserable wretches who toil sixteen or eighteen hours a day—father, mother, and even the little children—making match-boxes, or shirts or blouses, have "Plenty of Work," but I for one don't envy them. Perhaps you think that if there was no machinery and we all had to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day in order to obtain a bare living we should not be in a condition of poverty? Talk about there being something the matter with your minds—if there were not you wouldn't talk one day about Tariff Reform as a remedy for unemployment and then the next day admit that machinery is the cause of it! Tariff Reform won't do away with machinery, will it?'
'Tariff Reform is the remedy for bad trade,' returned Crass.
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