ons,
and clothing, and furniture, and stoves, and pots are pouring out of
those nests of industry, so that even they are beginning to cry out,
"Why don't you buy what we want to sell, and thus make _us_ rich?"

If, then, we in New England refuse to buy--refuse to buy at profitable
prices the productions of old England--what does England propose to do
with her millions of non-food-producing workmen? She demands free
trade; says we are fools for not opening our ports and accepting with
effusion the blessings of cheap goods she would so willingly send us?
She does not quite like to open _our_ ports, as she did those of China,
nor does she incline at present to carry into France the civilizing
influences of her cheap looms at the point of the bayonet. _She_ must
answer the question, not I.

And in New England--if that "West," with its fertile fields and its
surplus food, will go to making cheap shoes and cheap cotton, and will
not see how much happier she would be if she would only make corn and
pork and swap them with New England for shoes and cotton--what will New
England, what will Massachusetts do with her 507,034 workers who do not
produce their own food? This is rather a vital question to those men
and women who have no food. It is rather vital too to the capital
invested in mills and machines in Lowell and elsewhere.

I come back now to my first proposition for the cure of the ills of
life--_cheap labor_.

If trade be the true god, let us worship him; if to buy cheap and sell
dear be the true gospel, let us extend that; if to convert men and
women into tenders to machines be really the perfection of human
nature, let us import the wild African and the heathen Chinee rapidly,
largely, for nothing can be cheaper than they. Let us get ready our
ships; let us open the ports of Dahomey, and Congo, and Canton, and
Shanghai; let us exchange whiskey and tobacco for able-bodied men and
women; let us fill this land with the black men and the copper men; let
us perfect our civilization, for those men and those women can live
cheap and work cheap; and if _white_ men and _white_ women do go to the
wall--why should they not?

Gentle reader, you ask what is the _moral_?

I reply, Does not our civilization demand _cheap cotton_ and not great
_men and women_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand free _pauper immigration_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand cheap _Chinese immigration_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand