Page:Alexander Jonas - Reporter and Socialist (1885).djvu/23

 the word—receive for their hard day's work an amount hardly sufficient to enable them to live, and they do live a life the like of it in the respective countries is considered one of utter want and misery. And everywhere to these millions of workers, to be sick or out of employment even for a very short while means desolation and despair. They are all without any hopes for the better in future times; they have no prospects to extricate themselves from this quagmire of misery, and to become independent that they may live in comfort and ease as human beings ought to; and this condition prevails in New York as well as in Paris, in San Francisco as well as in Manchester. Such is the inexorable economic law for all countries of the globe, and there is a difference only in the condition of nations so far, as opinions differ in regard to what is to be considered a "low standard of life." But even supposed—for I do not admit it yet—that the "low standard of life" for the United States be comparatively the highest of all countries, it would not change the fact that the standard of life in general for all working people is falling off to a lower level continually, and that larger numbers of people are being reduced to a lower standard with every day in the year.

You would then, if I understand you right, attribute the fact that the working people of America have a comparatively better standard of life—be it ever as low as you describe it—for all that to the more favorable, natural resources of this country?

Not only do I attribute it to them, but also to the former and higher standard of life to which the entire American people was accustomed before capitalism introduced its detrimental mode of production. Resistance against lowering the standard of life retards the social upheaval which the force of circumstances must finally bring about irresistibly. And as to our "uncounted millions" of acres of fertile lands open to all who desire to settle down upon them, you know well enough that this is hardly more than a ridiculous phrase. I want to see the man who is going to show me a plot of even 100,000 acres of homestead land of any value whatsoever! All the really valuable land has been taken up already. Under the fearful corruption of our Congress, the people have been robbed