The rest of the race, if it were to remain law-abiding, would be compelled to change the law or starve to death, would it not? What else could the race do? Nobody would have any work. Nobody would therefore have anything with which to buy. The single giant machine might be capable of producing, with the push-button help of its owner, more necessities and luxuries than the entire race could consume. The automatic railway system might be capable of delivering to every door everything that everybody might want. The single owner might have more billions of dollars than Mr. Rockefeller has cents. But nobody else would have anything.
What I am trying to show is that the private ownership of machinery is a gigantic wrong. If it were not a wrong, the world would be helped by the private ownership of a single machine fitted to produce every material thing that the race needs. If the people owned such a machine, there would certainly be no more poverty. There would be no more poverty because the people would get what the machine produced.
If this be plain, let us further consider the present situation.
We live in a wonderful world.
It is big enough and rich enough to enable everybody in it to live in comfort.
But hundreds of millions throughout the world do not live in comfort because the progress of the world has brought relatively little to them.
They have no share of stock in the earth—somebody who has a little piece of paper in his hand claims the ownership of the spot of earth upon which they wish to lay their heads and charges them rent for using it.
Another little group own all of the machinery, handing out jobs here and there to the men who offer to work for the least.
Nor is this a chance situation. A small class has always robbed the great class. It has been and is the rule of the world. The methods of robbery have been changed. Method after method has been abandoned as the people awakened to the means by which they were being robbed. But robbery has never been abandoned. The small, greedy, cunning class that will not be content with what it can earn is here to-day, playing the old game with a new method.
Socialists declare the new method is to own the industrial machinery with which all other men must work. You may not agree with this. Probably you do not. If you do not, will you kindly answer some questions?