Let those be types of the consumer: but now for the producer; I mean
the real producer, the worker; how does this scramble for the plunder
of the market affect him? The manufacturer, in the eagerness of his
war, has had to collect into one neighbourhood a vast army of
workers, he has drilled them till they are as fit as may be for his
special branch of production, that is, for making a profit out of it,
and with the result of their being fit for nothing else: well, when
the glut comes in that market he is supplying, what happens to this
army, every private in which has been depending on the steady demand
in that market, and acting, as he could not choose but act, as if it
were to go on for ever? You know well what happens to these men:
the factory door is shut on them; on a very large part of them often,
and at the best on the reserve army of labour, so busily employed in
the time of inflation. What becomes of them? Nay, we know that well
enough just now. But what we don't know, or don't choose to know,
is, that this reserve army of labour is an absolute necessity for
commercial war; if OUR manufacturers had not got these poor devils
whom they could draft on to their machines when the demand swelled,
other manufacturers in France, or Germany, or America, would step in
and take the market from them.

So you see, as we live now, it is necessary that a vast part of the
industrial population should be exposed to the danger of periodical
semi-starvation, and that, not for the advantage of the people in
another part of the world, but for their degradation and enslavement.

Just let your minds run for a moment on the kind of waste which this
means, this opening up of new markets among savage and barbarous
countries which is the extreme type of the force of the profit-market
on the world, and you will surely see what a hideous nightmare that