ABSTRACT
In an angry polemic, Wallace laments the ‘reckless destruction’ of the Earth in the pursuit of profit. His religious socialist convictions are apparent in criticizing the voraciousness and ungodliness of capitalism. Interestingly, this includes the oil industry, which, at the time, was very much in its infancy and not yet the environmental pariah it would later become. But the extraction of the mineral products stored in the earth, in order to increase individual wealth, and to the same extent to the diminution of national well-being, is only a portion of the injury done to posterity by the “plunder of the earth.” In tropical countries many valuable products can be cultivated by means of cheap native labor, so as to give a large profit to the European planter. Even the lust of conquest, in order to secure slaves and tribute and great estates, by means of which the ruling classes could live in boundless luxury.
