My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

A LECTURE-TOUR IN AMERICA 289become a vast organized business over all the WesternStates, and is considered to be a proper and naturalmode of getting rich. It is what the Stock Exchangeis to the great cities.And this wealth, thus gained byindividuals, initiates that process which culminates inrailroad and mining kings, in oil and beef trusts, andin the thousand millionaires and multi-millionaireswhose vast accumulated incomes are, every penny ofthem, paid by the toiling workers, including the fivemillion of farmers whose lives of constan toil onlyresult for the most part in a bare livelihood, while therailroad magnates and corn speculators absorb thelarger portion of the produce of their labour.What a terrible object-lesson is this as to thefundamental wrong in modern societies which leadsto such a result ! Here is a country more thantwenty-five times the area of the British Islands,with a vast extent of fertile soil, grand navigablewaterways, enormous forests, a superaboundingwealth of minerals—everything necessary for thesupport of a population twenty-five times that ofours—about fifteen hundred millions—which has yet,in little more than a century, destroyed nearly allits forests, is rapidly exhausting its marvellousstores of natural oil and gas, as well as those of theprecious metals ; and as the result of all this recklessexploiting of nature's accumulated treasureshas brought about overcrowded cities reeking withdisease and vice, and a population which, thoughonly one-half greater than our own, exhibits all thepitiable phenomena of women and children workinglong hours in factories and workshops, garrets andcellars, for a wage which will not give them theessentials of mere healthy animal existence ; whileabout the same proportion of its workers, as withu