Thus we see human labour has been cut to the extent of from eighty to ninety-five per cent. From other sources I have gathered a few facts about the latest machinery. In Pennsylvania, some sheep were shorn and the wool turned into clothing in six hours, four minutes. A steer was killed, its hide tanned, turned into leather and made into shoes in twenty-four hours. The ten million bottles used by the Standard Oil Company every year are now blown by machinery. An electric riveting-machine puts rivets in steel-frame buildings at the rate of two per minute. Two hundred and sixty needles per minute, ten million match-sticks per day, five hundred garments cut per day—each by a machine tended by one little boy. The newest weaving-looms run through the dinner hour and an hour and a half after the factory closes, making cloth with no one to tend them at all. The new basket-machine invented by Mergenthaler, the inventor of the linotype, is now in operation everywhere, “making fruit-baskets, berry-baskets and grape-baskets of a strength and quality never approached by hand labour. Fancy a single machine that will turn out completed berry-baskets at the rate of twelve thousand per day of nine hours’ work! This is at the rate of one thousand three hundred per hour, or over twenty baskets a minute! One girl, operating this machine, does the work of twelve skilled hand operators!” Since all these wonders are the commonplace facts of modern industry, it is not surprising that here and there men should begin to think about them; here is the naïve question recently asked by the editor of a Montreal newspaper which I happened on: “With the best of machinery at the present day, one man can produce woollens for three hundred people. One man can produce boots and shoes for one thousand people. One man can produce bread for two hundred people. Yet thousands cannot get woollens, boots and shoes, or bread. _There must be some reason for this state of affairs._” There is a reason, a perfectly plain and simple reason, which all over the world the working-people, whom it concerns, are coming to understand. The reason is that all the woollen manufactories, the boot and shoe and bread manufactories, and all the sources of the raw materials of these, and all the means of handling and distributing them when they are manufactured, belong to a few private individuals instead of to the community as a whole. And so, instead of the cotton-spinner, the shoe-operative and the bread-maker having free access to them, to work each as long as he pleases, produce as much as he cares to, and exchange his products for as much of the products of other workers as he needs, each one of these workers can only get at the machines by the consent of another man, and then does not get what he produces, but only a small fraction of it, and does not get that except when the owner of the balance can find some one with money enough to buy that balance at a profit to him!