utually increase
the rate of interest or dividends on their capital. This is the motive
that draws them into cooeperation.

The learned and benevolent statesmen, teachers of economy and
reformers, have not suggested an adequate remedy. The remedy is not
far to find. Do away with usury and they will fall apart like balls of
sand; the cohesive power will be gone; the centralization will cease
and the wealth will speedily return to the various individuals from
whom it was gathered. This remedy may seem heroic, but it is a
specific and is the simplest of all possible methods.

3. How to secure a just distribution of the great advantages from
improved machinery, new inventions and new discoveries, is a problem
that is engaging the best thought of many of the wise and good. That
the present distribution is inequitable and unfair; that it gives the
capitalist an undue advantage over the laborer; that it aggravates the
difference in conditions, seems generally admitted.

An improved machine, owned by a capitalist, enables one man to do the
work that formerly required ten. One man is employed and the nine are
in competition for his place and there is no advance over the wages
before the machine was introduced. The owner of the machine secures
the gain. His wealth is greatly increased while the laborer plods on
with his old wages. With the new machine the one man produces what ten
men did before, but the product of the nine are credited to the
machine and becomes the capitalist's gain.

(_a_) The falsehood on which this claim rests must be seen and
rejected before the evil can be overcome; that the machine is
productive. It is but a tool in the hands of the one man, who now with
it produces as much as ten men did without it. If one does the work of
ten he earns the reward of ten. Because by this machine he multiplies
his strength, and adds to his efficiency, he can not justly be
deprived of his full reward.

(_b_) "But the machine is owned by another." His not owning the
machine does not change its nature and make it a productive force.
Whether it belongs to him or to another, it is his intelligent vital
energy that produces all that is produced. The machine is but his tool
with which he works.

(_c_) "But the machine must be paid for." Certainly, the inventors and
skilled mechanics, who produced this wonderful tool, should be fully
compensated, but once paid they have no claim upon it or on what
another may produce with