-Socialist opponents."[41]

British social legislation has been a failure. Never was the lot of
the workers worse than it is now. "Your legislation for the past
hundred years is a perpetual and fruitless effort to regulate the
disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunken, your
incompetent, your sick, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have
dissolved all human and personal ties. The salient characteristic of
your civilisation is its irresponsibility. The making of dividends is
the universal preoccupation; the well-being of the labourer is no
one's concern. You depend on variations of supply and demand which
you can neither determine nor anticipate. The failure of a harvest,
the modification of a tariff in some remote country dislocates the
industry of millions, thousands of miles away. You are at the mercy of
a prospector's luck, an inventor's genius, a woman's caprice--nay, you
are at the mercy of your own instruments. Your capital is alive and
cries for food."[42]

Virtue has disappeared, religion is a fraud, clergy and priesthood are
mercenary, cowardly, and interested time-servers. "The priests and the
parsons are salary-slaves as much as the workers are wage-slaves. The
majority of them dare not preach the Gospel of Humanity, Justice, and
Socialism from their pulpits owing to their fear of their paymasters.
Religion is divorced from business, politics, the administration of
public authorities, the treatment of the aged worker, and written
across the actions of the professing Christians is 'Self-interest;
every man for himself and the Workhouse take the hindmost.'"[43]

Life is hell, and only Socialism can regenerate the world.

Things are all wrong, and we must put them right
So say all Socialists, and truly too.
Man does not get the chance here to subdue
The brute in self; and hence the fearful blight
Which makes one sicken at the dreadful sight
Of all society in one hell stew.[44]

Apparently all British workers spend their lives in terrible misery
and constant privation. Hunger and despair are their constant
companions, and they will see in Socialism their only salvation even
if Socialism should destroy individual liberty, for to them individual
liberty is a word without meaning. One of the most prominent British
Socialists, Mr. Philip Snowden, M.P., in a pamphlet addressed to
working men, writes: "Let those who fear that Socialism will destroy
individual libert