needn't go at length into the subject of adulteration, for every one
knows what kind of a part it plays in this sort of commerce; but
remember that it is an absolutely necessary incident to the
production of profit out of wares, which is the business of the so-
called manufacturer; and this you must understand, that, taking him
in the lump, the consumer is perfectly helpless against the gambler;
the goods are forced on him by their cheapness, and with them a
certain kind of life which that energetic, that aggressive cheapness
determines for him: for so far-reaching is this curse of commercial
war that no country is safe from its ravages; the traditions of a
thousand years fall before it in a month; it overruns a weak or semi-
barbarous country, and whatever romance or pleasure or art existed
there, is trodden down into a mire of sordidness and ugliness; the
Indian or Javanese craftsman may no longer ply his craft leisurely,
working a few hours a day, in producing a maze of strange beauty on a
piece of cloth: a steam-engine is set a-going at Manchester, and
that victory over nature and a thousand stubborn difficulties is used
for the base work of producing a sort of plaster of china-clay and
shoddy, and the Asiatic worker, if he is not starved to death
outright, as plentifully happens, is driven himself into a factory to
lower the wages of his Manchester brother worker, and nothing of
character is left him except, most like, an accumulation of fear and
hatred of that to him most unaccountable evil, his English master.
The South Sea Islander must leave his canoe-carving, his sweet rest,
and his graceful dances, and become the slave of a slave: trousers,
shoddy, rum, missionary, and fatal disease--he must swallow all this
civilization in the lump, and neither himself nor we can help him now
till social order displaces the hideous tyranny of gambling that has
ruined him.