Strong as is all this, it is nevertheless true, England is engaged in
a war of extermination waged against the labour of all other countries
employed in any pursuit except that of raising raw produce to be sent
to her own market, there to be exchanged for the cloth and the iron
produced at the mills and furnaces of her _millionaires_, who have
accumulated their vast fortunes at the expense of Ireland, India,
Portugal, Turkey, and the other countries that have been ruined by the
system which looks to the exhaustion of the soil of all other lands,
to the impoverishment and enslavement of their people, and which was
so indignantly denounced by Adam Smith. In the effort to crush them
she has been crushing her own people, and the more rapid the spread of
pauperism at home the greater have been her efforts to produce the
surplus labour which causes a fall of wages at home and abroad.

With the consolidation of land in the hands of a few proprietors there
is a steady decline in the number of people employed upon it, and an
equally steady one in that hope of rising in the world which is
elsewhere seen to be the best incentive to exertion. "The peasant
knows," says a recent English writer,[128] "that he must die in the
same position in which he was born." Again, he says, "the want of
small farms deprives the peasant of all hope of improving his
condition in life." The London _Times_ assures its readers that "once
a peasant in England, the man must remain a peasant for ever;" and Mr.
Kay, after careful examination of the condition of the people of
continental Europe, assures his readers that, as one of the
consequences of this state of things, the peasantry of England "are
more ignorant, more demoralized, less capable of helping themselves,
and more pauperized, than those of any other country in Europe, if we
except Russia, Turkey, South Italy, and some parts of the Austrian
Empire."[129]