But does this mean that our civilization is a failure, and the prime of life past for the Republic? Far from it. It means, I take it, that capitalism has done its work, and has become a hindrance, that the old industrial and social forms are inadequate to the new requirements and must be remodelled, and that promptly. It is now nearly half a century since Karl Marx wrote the following words, but they apply to the New York of to-day, as though he were among us and suffering with us:--
"It is the sad side which produces the movement that makes history by engendering struggle.... From day to day it becomes more clear that the conditions of production under which the capitalist class exists, are not of a homogeneous and simple character, but are two-sided, duplex; and that in the same proportion in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the same proportion in which there is development of the productive forces, there is also developed a force that begets repression; that these conditions only generate middle class wealth by continuously destroying the wealth of individual members of that class, and by producing an ever-growing proletariat."
It was in the year of our Lord 1806; the season, September; in the State of Tennessee, and the tenth year of its age, _as_ a State.
The summer was over, the harvests ripe, the year growing ruddy. Down in the cotton fields the balls had begun to burst, and the "hands," with their great baskets, to trudge all day down the long rows, singing in that dreamy, dolefully musical way which belongs alone to the tongue of the Southern slaves and to the Southern cotton fields. Across the fields, and the rich, old clover bottoms that formed a part of the Hermitage farm, the buzz of a cotton gin could be distinctly heard, adding its own peculiar note to the music of Southern nature.
A cotton gin! it was a rare possession in those days, and General Jackson's was known from Nashville to New Orleans. Indeed, the whole of the previous year's crop had not yet been disposed of. The great bales were heaped about, waiting for the flat-boats that would carry them up the Cumberland, down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and land them at the great New Orleans market. A slow trip for the bulky bales. Could they have foreseen the time when the tedious river's journey would be shortened to one day's run over a steel track, what must the big bales have thought! And those gigantic heaps of cotton seed which all the cows in the county could not have consumed, could they have "peered into the future" and found themselves in the _lard cans_! The old gin would have groaned aloud could it have known that it was buzzing itself into history as surely as was the tall, spare, erect man coming across the field in the late afternoon to see that the day's work was well done.