Page:Alexander Jonas - Reporter and Socialist (1885).djvu/56

 But, right here, I would like to make the very same objection you made only a short while ago. You said—and I think you were right—that it would be nonsensical to ask an unemployed cigarmaker to cultivate land out west. Even if you gave him all the implements necessary for successful cultivation, he would starve on the most fertile ground donated to him. Therefore, if we suppose that under the new social system an invention had been made by which 10,000 cigarmakers would become superfluous, what would you do with them? Would you have them till the soil, or what would they do?

You forget two important points. While to-day these 10,000 workers would be left to shift for themselves, that's to say: while they would be altogether helpless, the new society, in which all inventions and improvements will immediately benefit everyone, will have the means to gradually employ these 10,000 workers in other branches, where they will be occupied with some labor similar to their former trade, and they will soon learn it; the cost of such changes will be easily paid out of the gain accruing from the introduction of the new invention for the whole society. The second point of importance you forget, is that the division of labor will continually go on, and all work will finally be reduced to a few simple movements of the workers' hands in turning on some piece of machinery, or changing its speed, or stopping it, etc., a task that will be easy to learn within a very short time; consequently the change from one occupation to another will not cause serious trouble neither to the whole people, nor to the individuals undergoing such change; and, what to-day causes disaster to hundreds and thousands, will, under the new system benefit every single individual of the whole commonwealth.

I suppose, of course, that the organization as you pictured it to me as existing in the United States and Canada, should be extended all over the world?

Communism and Socialism will only then be a blessing to all mankind when it shall extend over every land of the globe; and when this should be the case, it will result in a glorious condition of those of whose future happiness and wealth