Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/212

Rh only at this period does the possibility arise for a small minority of persons to accumulate great wealth and for a large majority to sink into absolute poverty, physiological distress. A nation which consists of free tillers of the soil, is never poor. It can only become so by the subjection of the farmer into a slave, working for another, who deprives him of the results of his labor on his land, or else applies his labor in some other way so that he can no longer till the land, or else by the growth and increasing number of cities, absorbing and diminishing the agricultural public. A highly developed civilization thus condemns a group of individuals increasing daily in numbers and importance, to absolute poverty. The cities grow at the expense of the farming population. It favors the great manufacturing industries at the expense of animal and vegetable production, and produces a numerous wages-receiving class, whose members can not call a single inch of ground their own and live under abnormal conditions of existence, condemned to slow starvation the day that their factory, work-room or dock yard is closed. This is the point to which all the countries of western Europe have arrived, considered to be the wealthiest and most highly civilized in the world.

Their population is divided into a small minority, living in the midst of an aggressive and extreme luxury, partly attacked by a very frenzy of extravagance, and a great mass, consisting of persons who can only support life by the hardest exertions, or who in spite of all their efforts, find it impossible to attain to a normal human existence. The minority is daily growing richer, the contrast between its life and that of the millions is daily growing more decided, its importance and influence in the community is hourly increasing. When we are speaking of the unprecedented, foolish extravagance of certain