Outcaste

“ Neither labor nor consumption could be resumed for want of circulation; usury reigned on the ruins of society. The alternations of high prices and the depreciation of commodities finally crushed the people. ”

“ We assemble thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting-house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is little better than a myth. All intercourse between them is at an end. Rigid Castes are formed, and, as usual, mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust. Each Caste is without sympathy for the other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard to it. ”

“ The sun, with his light and heat, makes the labor of the farmer successful. The rising Nile moistening and fertilizing the land, prepares the way for the sower. The cow draws the plow and the harrow, and threshes the grain, but usury makes property bring all needed material good without effort on the part of the owner. ”

“ A'tim answered nothing as they journeyed down along the steep, heavily wooded river bank, its soft shale sides slid into mighty terraces, but in his heart was a murder thought, as he eyed the great bulk of his Brother Outcast, that he would also eat him. ”

“ In consequence, one of our company took so severe a cold that he returned to San Francisco from Stockton, abandoning mining; while another, a young man from Uxbridge—alas! will disregard all the earnest advice of his friends to return, and will go on, a doomed man—will reach the mines, and we shall there leave him in his grave. Poor C., may his sad story be a warning to multitudes of young men, having good business and good prospects at home, to remain there, contented with small, but steady and sure gains! ”

“ All these things—the increase of surplus hands, the high cost of living, grievances about wages and interest—tended to make the farms and workshops of England recruiting-grounds for the sea; and the young men would strike out for themselves as freighters, traders, privateers, or downright pirates, lured by the dazzling chance of great and sudden wealth. ”

“ Let us see what our imaginary group is likely to do with this surplus man and surplus woman. We will first take up the case of the surplus woman. She can be disposed of in two different ways so as to preserve the endogamy of the Caste. ”

“ Was the outcast or the world to blame for the inevitable result? The outcast, no doubt; outcasts always are.
"Look—look, Josephine!" cried Grace, bursting into the library, where most of the party were assembled that evening. Josephine, with her foot on the sofa, being the nucleus. "Ella, and Phil, and I have just come from rowing on the lake, and see what we found, up by the pine trees at the other end of the lake, floating on the water." ”

“ We are encircled by people of princely fortune; and luxury, in all its fertility of invention, reigns throughout this rich and beautiful country. But, oh! how much I miss the England of my early recollections! Mr. Otway and I often mourn over the progress of what is falsely called refinement, which has made the lower classes forget the simple sobriety, the active industry, the nice cleanliness of former times, and has rendered the higher orders a disgusting engraftment of foreign manners, customs, and language, upon a British stock. ”

“ When the recession has reached the point i, or, in other words, when the gradient of the stream below the fall crosses the junction of the beds of unequal hardness, as it ultimately must, effective undermining ceases, and the end of the fall is at hand. ”

“ The small supply of land, and the fury of multitudinous demands, had driven up prices to such absurd, and, the utilities considered, such impossible heights, that the inevitable reaction had already begun, involving numbers of families in most sudden and unexpected loss, and not a few in ruin. ”

“ Wading in icy waters, cordelling canoes in rocky torrents, transforming themselves into beasts of burden at every portage, working eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, cut off from all refinements of social and civilized life, condemned to exile and rapidly sinking to the level of savages, all this that the inordinate profits of their muscles and sinews may pour wealth into the coffers of this trade. ”

“ The first panic in his experience had unsettled values, trade was at a standstill, confidence was lacking, men hoarded their wealth and the wheels of many mills ceased to turn, while mill hands idly walked the streets or sought labor in distant parts of the globe. ”

“ Tillage and Grazing, tho’ not employing the Land to 1/10 Part its Value in such Colonies, would yet interfere with the present Interest also, by lowering the Price of Provisions; wherefore the Security from such Augmentation of People (the Merchants being Judges) give place to Profit, a Neglect that must be reaped in the End, by Undertakers of more generous Sentiments. ”

“ For in the gold country men will toil at their work, contented with their jobs and satisfied with their wage, and then, suddenly, comes the whispered news of a strike on some far distant creek or river. ”

“ After a lapse of time the merchants of the upper country began to be alarmed on finding their property make no returns, and their people never coming back. Several families and respectable men who had gone down the river were never heard of, and the losses became so frequent that it raised, at length, a cry of individual distress and general dismay. ”

“ But these words, conquest and subjugation, have a more significant meaning than the spoiling of one people by another; they are the actual price of possession. He who, toiling, subjugates the soil, is undoubted owner of its production, by virtue of the highest blessing on record—"By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou obtain bread." ”

“ How many thousands of vessels—how many millions of property—have been abandoned, and eventually consigned to the all-receiving depths of the ocean, through ignorance or through fear! What a mine of wealth must lie buried in its sands! ”

“ These numerous fluctuations and high prices have been caused by a variety of facts and circumstances, such as the hostility of Indians, scarcity of capital, high price of interest, muddy and snowy roads, rough and rugged mountains over which the merchandise had to pass, the scarcity of transportation animals, and the high price of labor. ”

“ As the sons were growing to an adult age, they added, by their labors, to the value of lands,—inserted a property into them that was truly their own; and their title was duly recognized. In a new country, land has but little value in itself; the value is imparted by the labor that clears it and prepares it to yield its products. ”

“ The Outcast “There is a race of people inhabiting the Vale of Lieze,
on the French side of the Pyrenees, who are supposed to be
descended from the Saracens, and are entirely excluded from
communion with the rest of mankind.—They are even obliged to
enter the churches by a separate door, and no one will make use
of the holy water which their touch has polluted.” ”

“ Nobody hangs by me. But my mill is standing idle, and I blame it on your wife. Am I alone in that? Go round and ask. Where are the mills? Where are the young men that should be working? Where is the currency? ”

“ Ambition, zeal, love, sometimes fear, will carry a man beyond the bounds set by nature. No matter what suspends the functions of the guard set at the threshold of the reserve, if the residual stock is touched, two consequences ensue—waste and depreciation. ”

“ That is so clear to any one looking below the surface that it suggests another objection—there might be an appearance of retreat at the first turning of the tide, of an inclination to escape, individually, from a prospect of losing battles and declining prosperity, and to leave others to face the renewal of disintegration and reaction, such as we saw in 1873. ”

“ But a farm in England, however little, wants money to buy, money to stock, and not infrequently money to carry on. It was only in Upsidonia that one could acquire it, stock it, work it without any previous experience, and live off it without any anxiety, as well as contribute three hundred pounds a year towards the income of somebody else, with no capital behind one. ”

“ You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the hill—for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they wandered. ”

“ We are to guide our British Friends into the new Gold-country, and show them the mines; nowise to dig-out and exhaust its wealth, which indeed remains for all time inexhaustible. Once there, let each dig for his own behoof, and enrich himself. ”

“ We unstrapped our knapsacks, and sat down upon the grass, and basked in the sun a while. Then we essayed to cross the stepping-stones with the knapsacks in our hands; but, finding this something of an undertaking, we pitched them gently on the opposite bank.
But that bank was sloping, covered with short smooth grass, and treacherous, so that both those knapsacks rolled back, and plunged into the water and sank, sending up a succession of air-bubbles.
I am a truthful historian (between these two covers, at any rate) , and write nothing but the truth ”

“ The relative value of improved land constantly increased with the length of time it had been under culture. It may be said that labor added two-thirds to the value of land, and that he who by the sweat of his brow added those two-thirds, to that extent owned the land. ”

“ I’ve heard tell of those old Spanish mines and of all the bloodshed it cost to get the gold out of ’em and out of the country. In those days a man wasn’t safe if he had over a hundred dollars’ worth of dust on his person. ”

“ If you’re going to stay on dangling there, the thousands of miners working down below wont’t be able to get to the surface and will be starved to death. But what’s worrying me more than them is, how I’m going to get out myself? ”

“ And the prince told him.
“Then I beg your Highness to ask Lucky Luck this question: Why is it that though I have an excellent mill, with all its machinery complete, and get plenty of grain to grind, I am so poor that I hardly know how to live from one day to another?” ”

“ Too restive and volatile to pursue the slow process of production, the wanderers, and consequently the collectors, of subsistence must (in a land where all things are appropriated) live upon the stock of the producers. ”

“ We must expect no income beside our outgoes. We must succeed now, and we shall not fail hereafter. So soon as we begin to count the cost, the cost begins.
If our scheme is well built within, any mishap to the outbuilding will not be fatal. ”

“ The monetary distress and confusion which had been produced by excessive speculation, and which had borne heavily even on some of the more wealthy individuals, have been overcome by economy, industry, and perseverance in developing the resources of the country ”

“ An apparently rich mine may suddenly come to an end; the miner may have reason to believe that if he could go down some thousands of feet he would again strike the rich vein; he may do this at great cost of machinery and labor only to find that the vein has totally disappeared, or does not exist. ”

“ Mines are opened, railways or bridges made, and many other works of uncertain profit commenced, and in these enterprises much capital is sunk which yields either no return, or none adequate to the outlay. ”

“ When the supply exceeds the demand, the value of this overproduction must greatly diminish; and every attempt will be made to produce, at any loss, an increased consumption. How many pairs of these gloves would you like to have, sir? ”

“ So far, you have only cut your two trusses of hay; we are afraid of setting fire to our paper-mill by bringing in a couple of thousand trusses. In other words, we may spoil more than one batch, make heavy losses, and find ourselves none the better for laying out a good deal of money. ”

“ Accordingly, when credit has been imprudently stretched, and the speculative spirit carried to excess, the turn of the exchanges, and consequent pressure on the banks to obtain gold for exportation, are generally the proximate cause of the catastrophe. ”

“ How a ‘stackie’ works to windward as she does, with the enormous windage presented by the stack, and with only the reduced canvas above it, is a mystery, and is admitted to be a mystery by the bargemen themselves. ”

“ New rushes, and supposed new rushes, were eagerly discussed; men were often passing and repassing our rock, looking for somebody who was "on gold" — for the majority of prospectors seldom push out for themselves, but prefer following up some man or party supposed to have "struck it rich." ”

“ A shabby and vicious economy constantly gives, in this extravagant and spendthrift generation, a load to one poor horse which would certainly, in a generation earlier, and undoubtedly in a century ago, only have been given to a pair of horses or even to two pairs with postillions. ”

“ In 1857, in the midst of the second building project, a financial panic struck the country. Business and industry were paralyzed with fear and distrust. Workmen, uncertain of their pay, laid down their tools. ”

“ How can you talk such folly, you who ought to know the enormous risks which capital runs in industry—in the mines, for example? A well-equipped pit to-day costs from fifteen hundred thousand francs to two millions ”