Page:Karl Marx - Free Trade - tr. Florence Kelley (1888).djvu/28

 24 cannot escape fate; in other words you cannot escape the necessary consequences of your own actions. A system of production based upon the exploitation of wage-labor, in which wealth increases in proportion to the number of laborers employed and exploited, such a system is bound to increase the class of wage-laborers, that is to say, the class which is fated one day to destroy the system itself. In the meantime, there is no help for it: you must go on developing the capitalist system, you must accelerate the production, accumulation, and centralization of capitalist wealth, and, along with it, the production of a revolutionary class of laborers. Whether you try the Protectionist or the Free Trade plan will make no difference in the end, and hardly any in the length of the respite left to you until the day when that end will come. For long before that day will protection have become an unbearable shackle to any country aspiring, with a chance of success, to hold its own in the world market.

FREDERICK ENGELS.