Can you, the reader, tell me? We manufacture more than we can use, you say. Unless we can sell the balance to the Chinamen some of our factories must close down, and then some of our people would starve. But why, I ask, cannot our own starving people have the things that go abroad—some of all that food that goes abroad, for instance? Why is it that the Chinamen come first and our own people afterwards? Until we have made some things for the Chinamen, you explain, we have no money to buy anything ourselves. And so always the Chinamen first. It seems such a strange, upside-down arrangement—does it not seem so to you? For, look you, the people of England are in the same fix, and the people of Germany are in the same fix—the people of all the competing nations are in the same fix! They actually have to go to war to kill each other, in order to get a chance to sell something to the Chinamen, so that they can get money to buy some things for themselves! They were actually doing that in Manchuria for eighteen months! More amazing yet, they had to go and murder some of the Chinamen, in order to compel the rest to buy something, so that they could get money to buy something for themselves! How long can it be possible for a human being, with a spark of either conscience or brains in him, to gaze at such a state of affairs and not _know_ that there is something wrong about it? And how long could he gaze before the truth of it would flash over him—that the reason for it is that some private party owns all the machinery and materials of production, and will not give the people anything, until they have first made something that can be sold! That all the world lies at the mercy of those who own the materials and machinery, and who leave men to starve when they cannot make profits! And that this is why we Americans cannot stay at home and be happy, but are forced to go trading with Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux, and competing for “empire” with our brothers in England and Germany and Japan! If the reader be an average American, these thoughts will be new to him. He has been brought up on a diet of misunderstood Malthusianism. He is told that life has always been a struggle for existence and always will be; that there is not food enough to go round, and that therefore, every now and then, the surplus population has to be cut down by famine and war. It is to be pointed out concerning the doctrine that, while he swears allegiance to it, he doesn’t like to think about it, and when it comes to the practical test he shows that he does not really believe it. Whenever famine comes, he subscribes to a grain-fund, and does his best to defeat nature; when war comes, he gets up a Red Cross Society for the same purpose. And yet he still continues to swear by this wiping out of the nations, and any discussion about abolishing poverty he waves aside as Utopian.