It is very characteristic that the English Government for years practised
 this method of “primitive accumulation” prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly
 for the use of the colonies. The fiasco was, of course, as complete as
 that of Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act. The stream of emigration was only diverted
 from the English colonies to the United States. Meanwhile, the advance
 of capitalistic production in Europe, accompanied by increasing Government
 pressure, has rendered Wakefield’s recipe superfluous. On the one hand,
 the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, year after year driven upon America,
 leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the
 wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there
 more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away.
 On the other hand, the American Civil War brought in its train a colossal
 national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest
 financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land
 on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c.,
 in brief, the most rapid centralisation of capital. The great republic
 has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant labourers. Capitalistic
 production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering
 of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought
 down to the normal European level. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated
 colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists by the Government, so loudly
 denounced even by Wakefield, has produced, especially in Australia [23],
 in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold diggings attract, and
 with the competition that the importation of English-commodities causes
 even to the smallest artisan, an ample “relative surplus labouring population,”
 so that almost every mail brings the Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia
 labour-market,” and the prostitution in some places flourishes as wantonly
 as in the London Haymarket.