“But who invented all the machinery?” cried Crass.
“That’s more than you or I or anyone else can say,” returned Owen, “but it certainly wasn’t the wealthy loafer class, or the landlords, or the employers. Most of the men who invented the machinery lived and died unknown, in poverty and often in actual want. The inventors too were robbed by the exploiter-of-labour class. There are no men living at present who can justly claim to have invented the machinery that exists today. The most they can truthfully say is that they have added to or improved upon the ideas of those who lived and worked before them. Even Watt and Stevenson merely improved upon steam engines and locomotives already existing. Your question has really nothing to do with the subject we are discussing: we are only trying to find out why the majority of people have to go short of the benefits of civilization. One of the causes is—the majority of the population are engaged in work that does not produce those things; and most of what IS produced is appropriated and wasted by those who have no right to it.
“The workers produce Everything! If you walk through the streets of a town or a city, and look around, Everything that you can see—Factories, Machinery, Houses, Railways, Tramways, Canals, Furniture, Clothing, Food and the very road or pavement you stand upon were all made by the working class, who spend all their wages in buying back only a very small part of the things they produce. Therefore what remains in the possession of their masters represents the difference between the value of the work done and the wages paid for doing it. This systematic robbery has been going on for generations, the value of the accumulated loot is enormous, and all of it, all the wealth at present in the possession of the rich, is rightly the property of the working class—it has been stolen from them by means of the Money Trick.”...
For some moments an oppressive silence prevailed. The men stared with puzzled, uncomfortable looks alternately at each other and at the drawings on the wall. They were compelled to do a little thinking on their own account, and it was a process to which they were unaccustomed. In their infancy they had been taught to distrust their own intelligence and to leave “thinking” to their “pastors” and masters and to their “betters” generally. All their lives they had been true to this teaching, they had always had blind, unreasoning faith in the wisdom and humanity of their pastors and masters. That was the reason why they and their children had been all their lives on the verge of starvation and nakedness, whilst their “betters”—who did nothing but the thinking—went clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day.
Several men had risen from their seats and were attentively studying the diagrams Owen had drawn on the wall; and nearly all the others were making the same mental efforts—they were trying to think of something to say in defence of those who robbed them of the fruits of their toil.
“I don’t see no bloody sense in always runnin’ down the rich,” said Harlow at last. “There’s always been rich and poor in the world and there always will be.”
“Of course,” said Slyme. “It says in the Bible that the poor shall always be with us.”
“What the bloody ’ell kind of system do you think we ought to ’ave?” demanded Crass. “If everything’s wrong, ’ow’s it goin’ to be altered?”
At this, everybody brightened up again, and exchanged looks of satisfaction and relief. Of course! It wasn’t necessary to think about these things at all! Nothing could ever be altered: it had always been more or less the same, and it always would be.
“It seems to me that you all HOPE it is impossible to alter it,” said Owen. “Without trying to find out whether it could be done, you persuade yourselves that it is impossible, and then, instead of being sorry, you’re glad!”