y and hinder intellectual development go with their
talk to the machine-workers of our great northern towns, who are
chained for eleven hours a day to a monotonous toil, with the eye of
the overseer and the fear of dismissal spurring them on to an exertion
which leaves them at the end of their day's work physical wrecks, with
no ambition but to restore their wasted energies at the nearest
public-house. Let them go with their talk of the blessings of
civilisation to the pottery and chemical workers, whose systems are
poisoned, whose sight is destroyed, where, through the bodies of the
parents being saturated with poison, half the children are born dead,
and of the rest not one in four lives to be five--tell them to hold
fast to their share of the blessings of our glorious civilisation. Or
go to the sweaters' victims, living, eating, working, dying in one
room, for which a vampire landlord will take in rent one-half of all
the family can earn by working day and night--talk to them of
individual liberty and warn them of the tyranny of the coming
Socialism. Or go on a bitterly cold winter morning to the dock gates
of one of our great ports and see thousands of men waiting in the hope
of a day's job, and watch how a few here and there of the strongest
are selected, and the rest left to another day of hunger and despair;
or, wait still, and see how a few remain behind in the hope that their
mate may meet with an accident and 'they can snatch at the work he
had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity
under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the
mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the
victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular
pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you
that there is some foul iniquity in a system which allows one part of
the community to do another portion of it to death and to rob and
enslave those it is pleased to let live? Do you not see that those
your capitalists find it convenient and profitable to employ may live;
and that those they do not choose to employ must die? Do you not see
that these are hurried and driven hither and thither in haggard,
destitute misery; are thrust into festering heaps in your foul slums;
into your gaols, and penitentiaries, and workhouses; that they wander
in hopeless misery, hungering within sight of food, penniless amid
plenty, enforcedly idle, and work to