are a million or two of business firms in the country, and
five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the hand~
ling and rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the
planning and worrying, the balancing of petty profit and
loss. Consider the whole machinery of the civil law made
necessary by these processes; the libraries of ponderous
tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers
studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chi~
canery, the hatreds and lies! Consider the wastes
incidental to the blind and haphazard production of com~
modities, -- the factories closed, the workers idle, the goods
spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the stock-
manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the over~
stimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assign~
ments and bank-failures, the crises and panics, the deserted
towns and the starving populations! Consider the ener~
gies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades,
such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent.
Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities,
made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad-
rates; consider the slums, the bad air, the disease and the
waste of vital energies; consider the office-buildings, the
waste of time and material in the piling of story upon story,
and the burrowing underground! Then take the whole
business of insurance, the enormous mass of administrative
and clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste--"

"I do not follow that," said the editor.

"The Cooperative Commonwealth is a universal auto~
matic insurance company and savings-bank for all its mem~
bers. Capital being the property of all, injury to it is
shared by all and made up by all. The bank is the uni~
versal government credit-account, the ledger in which
every individual's earnings and spendings are balanced.
There is also a universal government bulletin, in which are
listed and precisely described everything which the com~
monwealth has for sale. As no one makes any profit by
the sale, there is no longer any stimulus to extravagance
and no misrepresentation; no cheating, no adulteration or
imitation, no bribery or 'grafting.'"

[[405]]

p404 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p405w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p406

v?