ed price?
The {90} answer is that the people created that value. We deprived
them of the land of England and drove them to the cities. In the
cities they, by their labour, made the land valuable; and the value
which they themselves created we turn against them. We exiled the
people from the soil; and in the cities, where we piled them, we turned
the values, which they created, into an instrument for their ultimate
destruction. They have made the land so valuable that cottages can no
longer be built on it, and the man with four children searches in vain
for a house. It is a staggering product of a perfect civilisation.
And still more staggering when one realises that the birthrate of these
poor people, for whom the Guinness Trust provides some measure of
comfort, is 36.95 per thousand, as compared to 17.53 in the west. The
section of the population still willing to carry on the race must pay
L11,000 an acre for the sites of their teeming tenements. Only after
that form can civilisation make room for the child.

{91}

IV

What guerdon has the State provided for the massed populations who have
the very riches they create thus turned into an instrument for their
impoverishment? One looks for that guerdon in vain. The vast majority
of them are consigned to a life of privation from birth to death.
Factories pour heavenward the smoke which lies over our cities as a
pall, and in the gloom men and women toil with bloodless faces
producing the goods which, elaborate and costly, or cheap and nasty,
crowd the markets of all the world. But ten millions of the toilers go
shivering through life ever tottering on the verge of the precipice of
want. Over one and a half millions of them were rated as paupers in
the years before the war. In the old Roman world half the population
were slaves, but three-fourths of our population are virtually slaves.
For the man who marries and has children, who is forced into a slum,
and is {92} once chained to the chariot of modern machinery, there is
no escape. 'Man is born free,' declared Rousseau, 'and is everywhere
in chains.' No chains of slavery were ever more degrading than those
forged in our day. Systems of indoor sweating found for their antidote
the pauper system of outdoor relief. England, that struck the shackles
off the African slaves, forged shackles for her own children. The
conditions of the modern slaves are in a sense worse than that of the
Roman serf. For the R