Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/14

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been achieved, was built by the people of the United States, aided by coolies and free negroes.

There was not a port, town, city, island, river, or sea over and through which I passed, where you did not see the British flag and the Stars and Stripes giving colour to earth and sky; and varied as were the people and languages which came in my way, the variety of industries which had been called into existence by those agencies was far greater. It would take me all night to recite to you the new and varied industries which the power of steam had called into existence. The amount of labour required to be done far exceeded the number of available labourers. Peru was dependent upon the Chinese coolie for loading her guano and attending to her sugar garden. She had millions of negroes and aborginals in her territory, but an insane philanthropy, aided by a Government who was dependent on popular clamour for its power, changed those negroes and aboriginals from soldiers of labour into free assassins and emancipated burglars. You could, five years later, when these beings got their liberty to go idle and cut men's throats, no more get them into industrial harness than you could harness the mosquitoes. The amount of money which Peru paid for alien labour during the period of her Guano Age is simply incredible, Chili was dependent upon the Cornish miner for developing her exhaustless wealth of copper. Bolivia is still entirely dependent upon British industry and commerce for the maintainance of her civilisation. Ecuador the same; the rivers and mountains of New Granada are dependent upon British and American enterprise for opening up her treasures. If any of these countries are showing signs of decadence—as they are—you will find that the process of this decay is co-existent with the breaking off of commercial relations with Great Britain. Peru would long ago have gone to the dogs but for British ships and British capital. So with the islands of the Spanish Main, and everywhere on both sides of that track of twenty thousand miles which I traversed in ninety-six days, do you see British hands on the face of that mighty clock whose works are regulated by British men, whose pendulum is British capital, and whose mainspring is the British way of life.

The changes which have come over the face of England during the past fifty years of her industrial war are precisely the changes which have come or are coming over the face of the world. Those changes include a re-distribution of wealth. Capital has been made aware of its responsibilities. Labour has so far advanced in intellect as to perceive that without capital labor is denuded of its ample fruition, and cannot achieve its greatest good. The dominant religions which fostered monopolies, enmities and strife have been undermined by that modern spirit of cooperation, which shows the interdependence of human beings on each other, and that the result of this co-operation must be the good of mankind.

By co-operation I do not mean that clubbing together which saves us 30 per cent, in wine, 25 per cent, in boots, 150 per cent, in drugs, and something respectable in butcher's meat and baker's crumb, but that divine co-operation in which the feet cannot say to the head I have no