cost of labour in the two cases respectively; and when that is the case the
Western employer loses money by buying a machine which saves a thousand per
cent. of his labour. With us the case is quite different: the living labour
which the steam-plough spares _us_ is hour for hour exactly as valuable as
the labour-time which has been bestowed upon the plough and has been
transformed into commodities; for in Freeland there is no distinction
between the profit of labour and the wages of labour, and in Freeland,
therefore, every theoretically useful--that is, every really
labour-saving--machine is at the same time, and of necessity, profitable.
This is the reason why in Freeland the manufacture of machines is
necessarily of such enormous and constantly increasing importance. One half
of our people are engaged in the manufacture of ingenious mechanical
implements, moved by steam, electricity, water, compressed or rarefied air,
by means of which the other half multiply their powers of production a
hundredfold; and it follows as a natural consequence that among us the
employment of machinery has developed a many-sidedness and a perfectness of
which those who are outside the limits of our country have no conception.
The most important manufacture taken in hand before the end of this first
year was that of steam-ploughs and--worked provisionally by animal
labour--seed-drills and reaping-machines sufficient for the cultivation of
the 64,000 acres which were to be brought under the plough for the October
harvest. We calculated that, by the initial expenditure of 3,500,000 hours
of labour, we should save at least 3,000,000 hours of labour yearly. In
other parts of the world that would have been a great misfortune for the
workers who would thus have been rendered superfluous, while the community
would not have profited at all. We, on the contrary, were able to find
excellent employment for the labour thus saved, which could be utilised in
producing things that would elevate and refine, and for which the increased
productiveness of labour had created a demand.
A second work, which had to be carried out during the next year, was the
improvement of the means of communication by deepening the bed of the Dana
from the flour-mill above the Eden lake to the great waterfall on the Dana
plateau, and by the construction of a railway across the Dana plateau. With
this were to be connected rope-lines on several of the Kenia foot-hills for
the use of the miners and the foresters.
That all the existing industries were enlarged, and a great number of new
ones started, will be taken for granted. It should be mentioned that only
such factories were erected in Eden Vale or on the upper course of the Dana
as would pollute neither the air nor the water; the less cleanly
manufactures were located at the east end of the Dana plateau, close upon
or even below the waterfall. Later, means were found of preventing any
pollution whatever of the water by industrial refuse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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