Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/67

 ever was won for the few, by war and commerce, in the past. We have agencies and powers at command for the production of wealth, and facilities for its rapid interchange, which the ancient world never dreamt of, and which to even our own grandfathers in the last century would have seemed as marvellous as a Barmecidal feast or any other brain-creation in an Arabian tale. By the agency of a single inanimate power, that consumes not and never tires, we can do more to change the face of terrestrial creation than could be done by the labour of all the men and horses in the known world. We have already in full play, though misapplied, a sufficiency of this power to equal the labour of 700 or 800 millions of hands, with a capability of enlarging its application and uses ad libitum, and with mechanical contrivances within reach whereby that gigantic power may be made available for the performance of every operation now performed by human hands, and for the production and distribution of every description of wealth and luxury desirable for man's use. We can raise more sustenance for man and beast from an acre of land than could the ancients from six. We can transport tons of merchandise in ten or twelve hours to distances which our ancestors could hardly have reached within as many days. We could, were it worth while, light up the whole of this vast metropolis at a single stroke of the clock. We have learned to ride by vapour, to sketch and paint with the sunbeam, and to transmit our messages by the lightning. In the subjugation of the elements to man's use, we have opened new fields for ambition, new roads to glory, whose trophies will, ere long, throw those of kings and conquerors into the shade, and render statecraft, priestcraft, lawyer-craft, and every other description of craft now in the service of landlordism and money-mongering, as odious and as obsolete as the occult sciences.

With these powers and appliances at command, no portion of the human race needs the subjugation of any other portion for the gratification of its utmost legitimate wants and desires. With such prodigious advantages in its favour, the age we live in ought to witness the extinction of every vestige of every description of slavery known to man. The transition from chattel-slavery to proletarianism and wages-slavery cost, as we shall see, rivers of human blood; and, nevertheless, man's ignorance and barbarity have, as we have seen, made the change rather a curse than a blessing to the majority of his fellows. The second social revolution—the transition from proletarianism and wages-slavery to real and universal emancipation—may be effected without the loss of a single life, or the sacrifice of a shilling's worth of his possessions to any man of any class. Such, at least, is the creed of us, National Reformers. To make that creed known and appreciated by submitting it to a full and impartial examination by the public, and thereby to enlist as many as we can of the good and wise of all classes in the cause of human redemption, is, we hardly need say, the main object of this inquiry. In entering upon it, we found it necessary to begin at the beginning. The light of the past, though a lurid one, has appeared to us necessary to illumine the present; and, to see our way clearly into the