`But it is not only the wage-earning class that is being hurt; for while they are being annihilated by the machinery and the efficient organization of industry by the trusts that control and are beginning to monopolize production, the shopkeeping classes are also being slowly but surely crushed out of existence by the huge companies that are able by the greater magnitude of their operations to buy and sell more cheaply than the small traders.
`The consequence of all this is that the majority of the people are in a condition of more or less abject poverty - living from hand to mouth.It is an admitted fact that about thirteen millions of our people are always on the verge of starvation.The significant results of this poverty face us on every side.The alarming and persistent increase of insanity.The large number of would-be recruits for the army who have to be rejected because they are physically unfit; and the shameful condition of the children of the poor.More than one-third of the children of the working classes in London have some sort of mental or physical defect; defects in development; defects of eyesight; abnormal nervousness; rickets, and mental dullness.The difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime that calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance upon those who are responsible for it.
`It is childish to imagine that any measure of Tariff Reform or Political Reform such as a paltry tax on foreign-made goods or abolishing the House of Lords, or disestablishing the Church - or miserable Old Age Pensions, or a contemptible tax on land, can deal with such a state of affairs as this.They have no House of Lords in America or France, and yet their condition is not materially different from ours.You may be deceived into thinking that such measures as those are great things.You may fight for them and vote for them, but after you have got them you will find that they will make no appreciable improvement in your condition.You will still have to slave and drudge to gain a bare sufficiency of the necessaries of life.You will still have to eat the same kind of food and wear the same kind of clothes and boots as now.Your masters will still have you in their power to insult and sweat and drive.Your general condition will be just the same as at present because such measures as those are not remedies but red herrings, intended by those who trail them to draw us away from the only remedy, which is to be found only in the Public Ownership of the Machinery, and the National Organization of Industry for the production and distribution of the necessaries of life, not for the profit of a few but for the benefit of all!
`That is the next great change; not merely desirable, but imperatively necessary and inevitable! That is Socialism!
`It is not a wild dream of Superhuman Unselfishness.No one will be asked to sacrifice himself for the benefit of others or to love his neighbours better than himself as is the case under the present system, which demands that the majority shall unselfishly be content to labour and live in wretchedness for the benefit of a few.There is no such principle of Philanthropy in Socialism, which simply means that even as all industries are now owned by shareholders, and organized and directed by committees and officers elected by the shareholders, so shall they in future belong to the State, that is, the whole people - and they shall be organized and directed by committees and officers elected by the community.
`Under existing circumstances the community is exposed to the danger of being invaded and robbed and massacred by some foreign power.
Therefore the community has organized and owns and controls an Army and Navy to protect it from that danger.Under existing circumstances the community is menaced by another equally great danger - the people are mentally and physically degenerating from lack of proper food and clothing.Socialists say that the community should undertake and organize the business of producing and distributing all these things;that the State should be the only employer of labour and should own all the factories, mills, mines, farms, railways, fishing fleets, sheep farms, poultry farms and cattle ranches.
`Under existing circumstances the community is degenerating mentally and physically because the majority cannot afford to have decent houses to live in.Socialists say that the community should take in hand the business of providing proper houses for all its members, that the State should be the only landlord, that all the land and all the houses should belong to the whole people...
`We must do this if we are to keep our old place in the van of human progress.A nation of ignorant, unintelligent, half-starved, broken-spirited degenerates cannot hope to lead humanity in its never-ceasing march onward to the conquest of the future.
`Vain.mightiest fleet of iron framed;
Vain the all-shattering guns Unless proud England keep, untamed, The stout hearts of her sons.
`All the evils that I have referred to are only symptoms of the one disease that is sapping the moral, mental and physical life of the nation, and all attempts to cure these symptoms are foredoomed to failure, simply because they are the symptoms and not the disease.
All the talk of Temperance, and the attempts to compel temperance, are foredoomed to failure, because drunkenness is a symptom, and not the disease.
`India is a rich productive country.Every year millions of pounds worth of wealth are produced by her people, only to be stolen from them by means of the Money Trick by the capitalist and official class.
Her industrious sons and daughters, who are nearly all tdtal abstainers, live in abject poverty, and their misery is not caused by laziness or want of thrift, or by Intemperance.They are poor for the same reason that we are poor - Because we are Robbed.
