ontrary, with the phenomenal growth of municipal
enterprise in Great Britain pauperism, actual and percentual, has also
grown at an alarming rate. It is significant that poverty and
distress have increased most rapidly, and have become most acute, in
those localities in which municipal enterprise has been most active
and in which Socialist councils have held undisputed sway, as, for
instance, in East and West Ham and Poplar. Municipal enterprise, by
increasing the rates--and, with the rates, the rents--has increased
the general cost of living without at the same time increasing
production. On the contrary, it has driven factories away through high
rates. Therefore municipal enterprise has increased the expenditure of
the general body of workers without increasing their earnings, and
consequently has directly increased the existing poverty which it has
promised to abolish. Municipal enterprise has succeeded chiefly in
giving from the rates high wages to municipal employees at the cost of
all other workers.

Municipal Socialists rather rely on force than on justice in dealing
with private business men. "For private traders to fight against
municipalisation is a short-sighted policy. One thing is certain--they
have to go. 'What! Compete with us with the ratepayers' money? Our own
money? What injustice!' says the small trader."[675] This just
objection of the ratepayers is answered with a contemptible quibble.
"The small trader is mistaken. The municipality does not use their
money, and would not use their money, under the supposed
circumstances. If the London County Council decided to open 1,000
bread-shops, how would they raise the capital required? Not by taking
the ratepayers' money, or the private traders' money, but by going
into the money market and borrowing on the credit of all the citizens.
Suppose _100,000l._ were required? Not a penny would come out of the
rates. The credit of all the citizens of London is so good that they
can borrow all the money they want without any difficulty."[676] In
other words, the Social-"Democratic" politician claims for himself the
right of arbitrarily depriving citizens who possess property of that
property and to ruin them by underselling them. They borrow the money
they require for these undertakings on the credit of the very
property-owners whom they wish to ruin, not on the credit of "all the
citizens," as Mr. Suthers pretends, and then they have the impudence
to assert that th