To illustrate this I may cite the case of the London tramways when the cars were drawn by horses, and of certain plantations in America before negro slavery was abolished there. The question to be decided by the tramway managers was, what is the most moneymaking way of treating tramway horses? A well-cared-for horse, if not overworked, may live twenty years, or even, like the Duke of Wellington’s horse, forty. On the other hand, reckless ill-usage will kill a horse in less than a year, as it will kill anyone else. If horses cost nothing, and a new horse could be picked up in the street when the old one died, it would be more profitable commercially to work horses to death in six months, say, than to treat them humanely and let them retire to the salt marshes of Norfolk at the age of eighteen or so. But horses cost money; and the tramway managers knew that if they wore out a horse too quickly he would not pay for his cost. After figuring it out they decided that the most profitable way of treating tram horses was to wear them out in four years. The same calculation was made on the plantations. The slave, like the horse, cost a substantial sum of money; and if he were worked to death too soon his death would result in a loss. The most businesslike planters settled that the most paying plan was to wear out their slaves in seven years; and this was the result they instructed their overseers to aim at. The Intelligent Woman will naturally exclaim “What a dreadful thing to be a company’s horse or a slave!” But wait a moment. Horses and slaves are worth something: if you kill them you have to pay for new ones. But if instead of employing horses and slave you employ “free” children and women and men, you may work them to death as hard and as soon as you like: there are plenty more to be had for nothing where they came from. What is more, you need not support them, as you have to support slaves, during the weeks when you have no work for them. You take them on by the week; and when trade is slack, and you have no work for them, you just discharge them, leaving them to starve or shift for themselves as best they can. In the heyday of Capitalism, when this system was in full swing, and no laws had been made to limit its abuse, small children were worked to death under the whip until it was commonly said that the northern factory employers were using up nine generations in one generation. Women were employed at the mines under conditions of degradation which would have horrified any negress in South Carolina. Men were reduced to lives which savages would have despised. The places these unhappy people lived in were beyond description. Epidemics of cholera and smallpox swept the country from time to time; typhus was commoner than measles today; drunkenness and brutal violence were considered as natural to the working classes as fustian coats and horny hands. The respectability and prosperity of the propertied and middle