Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/87

 A LITTLE ISLAND OR A LITTLE WORLD. 79

passed, some of the people would be able to take and enjoy a superabundance of all the fruits of labor without doing any labor at all, while others would be forced to work the livelong day for a pitiful living.

But let us introduce another element into the supposi- tion. Let us suppose great discoveries and inventions- such as the steam-engine, the power-loom, the Bessemer process, the reaping-machine, and the thousand and one labor-saving devices that are such a marked feature of our era. What would be the result *

Manifestly, the effect of all such discoveries and inven- tions is to increase the power of labor in producing wealth to enable the same amount of wealth to be produced by less labor, or a greater amount with the same labor. But none of them lessen, or can lessen the necessity for land. Until we can discover some way of making something out of nothing and that is so far beyond our powers as to be absolutely unthinkable there is no possible dis- covery or invention which can lessen the dependence of labor upon land. And, this being the case, the effect of these labor-saving devices, land being the private property of some, would simply be to increase the proportion of the wealth produced that landowners could demand for the use of their land. The ultimate effect of these dis- coveries and inventions would be not to benefit the laborer, but to make him more dependent.

And, since we are imagining conditions, imagine labor- saving inventions to go to the farthest imaginable point, that is to say, to perfection. What then ? Why then, the necessity for labor being done away with, all the wealth that the land could produce would go entire to the land- owners. None of it whatever could be claimed by any one else. For the laborers there would be no use at all. If they continued to exist, it would be merely as paupers on the bounty of the landowners !

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