When the gin trade was overdone and exhausted, and the slave trade suppressed, they went on into ordinary industrial work, and found that profits could be made by employing slaves as well as by kidnapping and selling them. They used their political power to induce the British Government to annex great tracts of Africa, and to impose on the natives taxes which they could not possibly pay except by working for the capitalists like English working men, only at lower wages and without the protection of English Factory Acts and English public opinion. Great fortunes were made in this way. The Empire was enlarged: “trade followed the flag” they said, meaning that the flag followed trade and then more trade followed the flag; British capital developed the world everywhere (except at home); the newspapers declared that it was all very splendid; and generals like Lord Roberts expressed their belief that God meant that three-quarters of the earth should be ruled by young gentlemen from our public schools, in which schools, by the way, nothing whatever was done to explain to them what this outrageous pillage of their own country for the development of the rest of the earth really meant over and above the temporary enrichment of their own small class. Nothing in our political history is more appalling than the improvidence with which we have allowed British spare money, desperately needed at home for the full realization of our own powers of production, and for the clearing away of our disgraceful slum centres of social corruption, to be driven abroad at the rate of two hundred millions every year, loading us with unemployed, draining us by emigration, imposing huge military and naval forces upon us, strengthening the foreign armies of which we are afraid, and providing all sorts of facilities for the foreign industries which destroy our powers of self-support by doing for us what we could and should do just as well for ourselves. If a fraction of the British spare money our capitalists have spent in providing South America with railways and mines and factories had been spent in making roads to our natural harbors and turning to account the gigantic wasted water power of the tideways and torrents of barren savage coasts in Scotland and Ireland, or even in putting an end to such capitalistic absurdities as the sending of farm produce from one English county to another by way of America, we should not now be complaining that the countries our spare money has developed can undersell our merchants and throw our workers on public charity for want of employment. 38 DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES