ered and properly
fed? If the child of the caveman did not have to work, why, then,
to-day, in the United States, are 80,000 children working out their lives
in the textile factories alone? If the child of the caveman did not have
to work, why, then, to-day, in the United States, are there 1,752,187
child-labourers?

It is a true count in the indictment. The capitalist class has
mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging. In New York City 50,000 children go
hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1,320 millionaires. The
point, however, is not that the mass of mankind is miserable because of
the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself. Far from it. The
point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable, not for want of
the wealth taken by the capitalist class, _but for want of the wealth
that was never created_. This wealth was never created because the
capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally. The capitalist
class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best
of its management, but made the worst of it. It is a management
prodigiously wasteful. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly.

In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the
caveman, and that modern man's food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a
thousandfold greater than the caveman's, no other solution is possible
than that the management is prodigiously wasteful.

With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented,
a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally
rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to
labour more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe
everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of
little luxuries to everybody. There would be no more material want and
wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no more men and
women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts. Not only would
matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered. In such a day
incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive of to-day, which
is the incentive of the stomach. No man, woman, or child, would be
impelled to action by an empty stomach. On the contrary, they would be
impelled to action as a child in a spelling match is impelled to action,
as boys and girls at games, as scientists formulating law, as inventors
applying law, as artists