from hand to
mouth, who work only a few days each week and loaf on the remaining
days, who waste all their earnings in drink, gambling, and
music-halls, and who possess nothing they can call their own, are
honest and excellent citizens. They are entitled to the savings of the
thrifty.

In accordance with the Socialist principles stated in the foregoing,
all shareholders, being merely exploiters of labour, would be
expropriated. "Are shareholders in companies useful in organising
labour?--As a rule they employ others to organise labour, and the work
done by the company would go on just as well if the shareholders
disappeared."[438] Besides, "Stocks when analysed, in nine cases out
of ten simply mean the right to squeeze tribute out of workers who are
nominally free. By far the greatest part of what is set down as
national 'capital' is merely slave flesh-and-blood."[439]

Holders of Government stocks would be treated no better than
landowners and shareholders. Foremost among the "immediate reforms"
demanded in the programme of the Social-Democratic Federation[440]
ranges the "Repudiation of the National Debt." The repudiation of the
National Debt has during many years been demanded, and is still
demanded, by the Social-Democratic Federation, as may be seen from a
recent issue of "Justice," its weekly publication, in which we find
the following statement: "The National Debt is simply a means of
extracting unearned incomes from the people of this country. It is
idle to nationalise or municipalise industries by means of loans on
which interest is paid. Such interest would be only another form of
rent and profit. When capitalism is abolished, every one of its many
forms will necessarily have to go."[441]

The repudiation of the National Debt is demanded by many Socialist
leaders and leading writers. "The National Debt (falsely so-called) has
already been paid thrice over in usury. All future interest-payments
should be held as part of the principal."[442] "The few thousand
persons who own the National Debt, saddled upon the community by a
landlord Parliament, exact _28,000,000l._ yearly from the labour of
their countrymen for nothing."[443] "Outside the land monopoly, the
most infamous source of usury is unquestionably the so-called 'National
Debt.' There the whole of the capital is absolutely spurious. The real
capital consisted of the gunpowder and the lead which Sovereigns and
statesmen expended so liberally about a ce