In obedience to this belief, new
portions of the earth's surface are continually brought under the sway
of industrialism. Vast tracts of Africa become recruiting grounds for
the labor required in the gold and diamond mines of the Rand,
Rhodesia, and Kimberley; for this purpose, the population is
demoralized, taxed, driven into revolt, and exposed to the
contamination of European vice and disease. Healthy and vigorous
races from Southern Europe are tempted to America, where sweating and
slum life reduce their vitality if they do not actually cause their
death. What damage is done to our own urban populations by the
conditions under which they live, we all know. And what is true of
the human riches of the world is no less true of the physical
resources. The mines, forests, and wheat-fields of the world are all
being exploited at a rate which must practically exhaust them at no
distant date. On the side of material production, the world is living
too fast; in a kind of delirium, almost all the energy of the world
has rushed into the immediate production of something, no matter what,
and no matter at what cost. And yet our present system is defended on
the ground that it safeguards progress!
It cannot be said that our present economic system is any more
successful in regard to the other three objects which ought to be
aimed at.
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