Centralization and Socialism [pp. 692a-694a]

CENTRALIZATION AND SOCIALISM.
old talriff, whereby many of the commonest articles of civiliaed.
life have been virtually prohibited; foreign capital will be
freely employed in the cultivation of sugar, rice, tobacco,
indigo, and other valuable crops, in the production of which
Nicaragua can compete with any country in the world; and
the resources of the mining districts will be developed by
energetic and experience min~rs from California.
CENTRALIZATION AND SOCIALISM.
The complaint is universal that modern implrovements,
while they lessen the labor required to create wealth, and are
vastly increasing its aggregate amount, beget continually its
more unequal distribution. They are, as yet, but engines in
the hands of the rich and the skillful to oppress the laboring
class. The large towns are consnuming the small ones, and
the great capitalists eating up the lesser ones. Every day
sends forth its new swarms of paupers, whilst every month
begets its millionaire. Capital becomes more powerful as it
is wielded in larger masses, and as it grows stronger it becomes more oppressive and exacting. The small capitalist
sympathizes somewhat with his laborers because hlie is not far
removed from them in social condition, and is acquainted
with their persons, their feelings, and their wants. The
wealthy capitalist soon learns to look on them as mere human
machines representing so much physical and industrial
power. It is a notorious statistical fact, that free laborers
generally throughout the world are suffering physical discoinfort and destitution. It is equally notorious that slaves in
all ages and countries have had their physical wants well
supplied. Such suffering and destitution as the free laboring
class now endure must injuriously affect their moral condition, and the statistics of crime everywhere attest the truth
of the theory. Mlan emancipated from human masters, and
remitted to the unfeeling despotism of capital, has, so far,
lost by the exchange, both physically and morally. His prospects in the fiuture are still darker than the past, for every
improvement in physical science and in the mechanic arts
are but mere instruments of oppression and exaction in the
hands of capital and skill. The wealth which labor is daily
creating are but new fetters that it welds wherewith its own
limbs are to be bound, for labor alone creates and pays the
profits of capital, and the larger the amount of capital, the
more labor will be required to pay its rents, interest, and
dividends. The condition of the domestic slave generally
improves in some degree as his master becomes more wealthy.
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