from this fearful task of extra labour?«
    He smiled bitterly. »Did they even try to?« said he. »I am not sure. You
know that according to the old saw the beetle gets used to living in dung; and
these people, whether they found the dung sweet or not, certainly lived in it.«
    His estimate of the life of the nineteenth century made me catch my breath a
little; and I said feebly, »But the labour-saving machines?«
    »Heyday!« quoth he. »What's that you are saying? the labour-saving machines?
Yes, they were made to save labour (or, to speak more plainly, the lives of men)
on one piece of work in order that it might be expended - I will say wasted - on
another, probably useless, piece of work. Friend, all their devices for
cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour. The
appetite of the World-Market grew with what it fed on: the countries within the
ring of civilisation (that is, organised misery) were glutted with the abortions
of the market, and force and fraud were used unsparingly to open up countries
outside that pale. This process of opening up is a strange one to those who have
read the professions of the men of that period and do not understand their
practice; and perhaps shows us at its worst the great vice of the nineteenth
century, the use of hypocrisy and cant to evade the responsibility of vicarious
ferocity. When the civilised World-Market coveted a country not yet in its
clutches, some transparent pretext was found - the suppression of a slavery
different from, and not so cruel as that of commerce; the pushing of a religion
no longer believed in by its promoters; the rescue of some desperado or
homicidal madman whose misdeeds had got him into trouble amongst the natives of
the barbarous country - any stick, in short, which would beat the dog at all.
Then some bold, unprincipled, ignorant adventurer was found (no difficult task
in the days of competition), and he was bribed to create a market by breaking up
whatever traditional society there might be in the doomed country, and by
destroying whatever leisure or pleasure he found there. He forced wares on the
natives which they did not want, and took their natural products in exchange, as
this form of robbery was called, and thereby he created new wants, to supply
which (that is, to be allowed to live by their new masters) the hapless,
helpless people had to sell themselves into the