had reached a
wonderful facility of production, and in order to make the most of that facility
they had gradually created (or allowed to grow, rather) a most elaborate system
of buying and selling, which has been called the World-Market; and that
World-Market, once set a-going, forced them to go on making more and more of
these wares, whether they needed them or not. So that while (of course) they
could not free themselves from the toil of making real necessaries, they created
in a never-ending series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the
iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance to them with the
real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with
a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system
going.«
    »Yes - and then?« said I.
    »Why, then, since they had forced themselves to stagger along under this
horrible burden of unnecessary production, it became impossible for them to look
upon labour and its results from any other point of view than one - to wit, the
ceaseless endeavour to expend the least possible amount of labour on any article
made, and yet at the same time to make as many articles as possible. To this
cheapening of production, as it was called, everything was sacrificed: the
happiness of the workman at his work, nay, his most elementary comfort and bare
health, his food, his clothes, his dwelling, his leisure, his amusement, his
education - his life, in short - did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance
against this dire necessity of cheap production of things, a great part of which
were not worth producing at all. Nay, we are told, and we must believe it, so
overwhelming is the evidence, though many of our people scarcely can believe it,
that even rich and powerful men, the masters of the poor devils aforesaid,
submitted to live amidst sights and sounds and smells which it is in the very
nature of man to abhor and flee from, in order that their riches might bolster
up this supreme folly. The whole community, in fact, was cast into the jaws of
this ravening monster, the cheap production forced upon it by the World-Market.«
    »Dear me!« said I. »But what happened? Did not their cleverness and facility
in production master this chaos of misery at last? Couldn't they catch up with
the World-Market, and then set to work to devise means for relieving themselves