This, Mr.West, is what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production.

I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing production.

Some time when we have plenty of leisure I am going to ask you to sit down with me and try to make me comprehend, as I never yet could, though I have studied the matter a great deal how such shrewd fellows as your contemporaries appear to have been in many respects ever came to entrust the business of providing for the community to a class whose interest it was to starve it.

I assure you that the wonder with us is, not that the world did not get rich under such a system, but that it did not perish outright from want.

This wonder increases as we go on to consider some of the other prodigious wastes that characterized it.
"Apart from the waste of labor and capital by misdirected industry, and that from the constant bloodletting of your industrial warfare, your system was liable to periodical convulsions, overwhelming alike the wise and unwise, the successful cut-throat as well as his victim.