were forced to employ their leisure in
useful work, our wealth would increase in proportion to the number of
producers, and more. Finally, we know that contrary to the theory
enunciated by Malthus--that Oracle of middle-class Economics--the
productive powers of the human race increase at a much more rapid ratio
than its powers of reproduction. The more thickly men are crowded on the
soil, the more rapid is the growth of their wealth-creating power.

Thus, although the population of England has only increased from 1844 to
1890 by 62 per cent., its production has grown, even at the lowest
estimate, at double that rate--to wit, by 130 per cent. In France, where
the population has grown more slowly, the increase in production is
nevertheless very rapid. Notwithstanding the crises through which
agriculture is frequently passing, notwithstanding State interference,
the blood-tax (conscription), and speculative commerce and finance, the
production of wheat in France has increased four-fold, and industrial
production more than tenfold, in the course of the last eighty years. In
the United States this progress is still more striking. In spite of
immigration, or rather precisely because of the influx of surplus
European labour, the United States have multiplied their wealth tenfold.

However, these figures give but a very faint idea of what our wealth
might become under better conditions. For alongside of the rapid
development of our wealth-producing powers we have an overwhelming
increase in the ranks of the idlers and middlemen. Instead of capital
gradually concentrating itself in a few hands, so that it would only be
necessary for the community to dispossess a few millionaires and enter
upon its lawful heritage--instead of this Socialist forecast proving
true, the exact reverse is coming to pass: the swarm of parasites is
ever increasing.

In France there are not ten actual producers to every thirty
inhabitants. The whole agricultural wealth of the country is the work of
less than seven millions of men, and in the two great industries, mining
and the textile trades, you will find that the workers number less than
two and one-half millions. But the exploiters of labour, how many are
they? In the United Kingdom a little over one million workers--men,
women, and children, are employed in all the textile trades; less than
nine hundred thousand work the mines; much less than two million till
the ground, and it appeared from the