died you might have to buy another one. Therefore the lot of the slave
under a good master was in many respects better than that of the
proletariat in our great cities."[98] "Poverty rather than property is
the reward of labour to-day."[99] "Poverty is our reward for creating
plenty, and the class that lives in luxury by exploiting our labour
contemptuously informs us that the law of supply and demand condemns
us to suffer the most hideous privation whenever our excessive
industry has created a glut of all the things that satisfy human
needs."[100]

The workers are unfree, being enslaved by the capitalists. It is true
that they possess freedom of contract, but freedom of contract, like
individual liberty, is an illusion, because the workers, being
penniless, are compelled to accept whatever work is obtainable, and to
be satisfied with whatever wages are offered. "The right to sell in
the markets is now well established, but the chief difficulty with the
majority of workers lies in the fact that they have nothing but their
labour to sell, and a market is not easy to find even for that."[101]

Although co-operation has made millions of workers in Germany, France,
Belgium, and other countries prosperous and independent, independence
is, according to the Socialists, for some unspecified reason,
unobtainable for the workers of Great Britain, and co-operation is a
failure. "The chance of the great bulk of the labourers ever coming to
work upon their own land and capital in associations for co-operative
production, has become even less hopeful than it ever was."[102]
"Everywhere the workman is coming to understand that it is practically
hopeless for him, either individually or co-operatively, to own the
constantly growing mass of capital by the use of which he lives."[103]
The advent of the great industry has not benefited but harmed him.
"The supersession of the small by the great industry has given the
main fruits of invention and the new power over Nature to a
comparatively small proprietary class, upon whom the mass of the
people are dependent for leave to earn their living."[104] "The worker
is now a mere item in a vast industrial army over the organisation and
direction of which he has no control. He is free, but free only to
choose to which master he will sell his labour--free only to decide
from which proprietor he will beg that access to the new instruments
of production without which he cannot exist."[105]

As the