Before the hungry can be set to work building mills and making machinery to equip them, somebody, possibly a woman, must invent the machinery. The capitalists buy her invention. If she is good at business, which very few inventors are, she makes them pay her enough to become a capitalist herself; but in most cases she makes a very poor bargain, because she has to sell the lion’s share in her invention for a few pounds to enable her to pay for the necessary models and trials. It is only in modern Big Business that inventiveness in method and organization superadded to mechanical ingenuity has a chance against capital. If you have that talent the Big Business people will not trouble to buy your patents: they will buy you at a handsome price, and take you into the concern. But the simpleminded mechanical inventor has no such luck. In any case, the capitalists have made a communist law nationalizing all inventions after fourteen years, when the capitalists can use them without paying the inventor anything. They soon persuade themselves, or at least try to persuade others, that they invented the machines themselves, and deserve their riches for their ingenuity. Quite a number of people believe them. Thus equipped with mechanical devices which are quite beyond the means of small producers, the big capitalists begin to wipe the small producers off the face of the earth. They seize on the work done by the handloom weaver in his cottage, and do it much more cheaply in great mills full of expensive machine looms driven by steam. They take the work of the oldtime miller with his windmill or waterwheel, and do it in vast buildings with steel rollers and powerful engines. They set up against the blacksmith a Nasmyth hammer that a thousand Vulcans could not handle, and scissors that snip sheet steel and bite off heavy bars more easily than he could open a tin of condensed milk. They launch huge steel ships, driven by machinery which the shipwrights who built for Columbus would have called devil’s work. They raise houses in skyscraping piles of a hundred dwellings one on top of another, in steel and concrete, so that in place of one horizontal street you have bunches of perpendicular ones. They make lace by machinery, more of it in a day than ten thousand women could make by hand. They make boots by machinery, clocks by machinery, pins and needles by machinery. They sell you machines to use yourself in your own house, such as vacuum cleaners, to replace your old sweeping brush and tea leaves. They lay on the electric power and hydraulic power that they use in their factories to your house like water or gas; so that you can light and heat your house with it, and have yourself carried in a lift from the basement to the attic and back again without the trouble of climbing the stairs. You can boil your kettle and cook your dinner with it. You could even make toast with it (they sell you a little oven for the