profit-market is: it keeps us sweating and terrified for our
livelihood, unable to read a book, or look at a picture, or have
pleasant fields to walk in, or to lie in the sun, or to share in the
knowledge of our time, to have in short either animal or intellectual
pleasure, and for what? that we may go on living the same slavish
life till we die, in order to provide for a rich man what is called a
life of ease and luxury; that is to say, a life so empty,
unwholesome, and degraded, that perhaps, on the whole, he is worse
off than we the workers are: and as to the result of all this
suffering, it is luckiest when it is nothing at all, when you can say
that the wares have done nobody any good; for oftenest they have done
many people harm, and we have toiled and groaned and died in making
poison and destruction for our fellow-men.

Well, I say all this is war, and the results of war, the war this
time, not of competing nations, but of competing firms or capitalist
units: and it is this war of the firms which hinders the peace
between nations which you surely have agreed with me in thinking is
so necessary; for you must know that war is the very breath of the
nostrils of these fighting firms, and they have now, in our times,
got into their hands nearly all the political power, and they band
together in each country in order to make their respective
governments fulfil just two functions: the first is at home to act
as a strong police force, to keep the ring in which the strong are
beating down the weak; the second is to act as a piratical body-guard
abroad, a petard to explode the doors which lead to the markets of
the world: markets at any price abroad, uninterfered-with privilege,
falsely called laissez-faire, {1} at any price at home, to provide
these is the sole business of a government such as our industrial
captains have been able to conceive of. I must now try to show you