“I agree with the young lady,” he says; “the source of all our ills is the capitalist system. It was born of steam-driven machinery and conceived in _laissez-faire_. It saw the light in Adam Smith’s England, ruined the health of the men of that country, and then came to America, where it grew fat on ‘liberty’ and ‘the right to do as one pleases with one’s own.’ It believed in competition--that is to say war--as its God, in whom all things lived and moved and sweated dividends; it made the acquisition of money, by no matter what means, the test of virtue and success, so that honest men became ashamed of themselves if they did not fail; it made all life a matter of ‘push’ and ‘pull,’ like the two sides of a door in one of those business palaces which make its cities great mazes of brick and stone rising like new Babels in the face of heaven. Its motto was, Beware of small profits; its aim was the greatest possible happiness of the smallest possible number. Out of competition it begot the trust, the rebate, and the ‘gentleman’s agreement’; out of ‘freedom of contract’ it begot wage-slavery; out of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ it begot an industrial feudalism worse than the old feudalism, based on the inheritance not of land, but of the living bodies and souls of thousands of men, women and children. When it came (in 1770) the annual income of England was $600,000,000; in 1901 the annual income of England was $8,000,000,000; the system has made a thousand millionaires, but it has left the people starving as before.[294] It has increased wages, and has increased prices a trifle more. It has improved the condition of the upper tenth of the workers, and has thrown the great remaining mass of the workers into a hell of torpor and despair. It has crowned all by inventing the myopic science of scientific management, whereby men are made to work at such speed, and with such rigid uniformity, that the mind is crazed, and the body is worn out twenty years before its time. It has made the world reek with poverty, and ugliness, and meanness, and the vulgarity of conspicuous wealth. It has made life intolerable and disgraceful to all but sheep and pigs.