of all the instruments of production. Consequently,
"the only means by which the excluded class can live is by working for
the capitalist class--by getting some one or other of the capitalist
class to allow them access to the tools and materials in his
possession, and pay them wages in return for their labour."[122]
However, the capitalists do not grant to the workers access to the
instruments of production free of charge. They exact a toll from them,
and employ them only if, by so doing, they can secure a profit for
themselves. In the fact that an employer will engage workmen only if
he can make a profit by their labour, the Socialists see a cruel
injustice. "Your capitalist class draw upon this excluded horde of
landless, toolless, foodless lack-alls, and do actually find work for
as many as they can employ at a profit to themselves. This excluded
class have no rights--not even the elementary right to exist. What God
meant by creating them when He knew, or might have known, that
everything belonged to the capitalists, nobody can understand."[123]
"The whole of our industrial system is founded on a principle existing
nowhere else in Nature, the principle of production and distribution
for profit. If no employer can make a profit out of the worker's
labour he is cast into the unemployed army."[124] "Seven out of every
eight persons in your community, 37,500,000 of the men, and women, and
children who form your nation, can lay no claim to any right to
exist--exist only on sufferance. If one or other of the irresponsible
persons who own the country can be induced to allow them to earn their
bread, well and good; if not, they must die. At the present moment
there are 700,000 persons shut out in this manner from any chance of
obtaining food to eat. You call it being 'out of work,' and can see
the spectral army, 700,000 strong, hungry and in want. They are not
kept idle and hungry because there is no 'work.' The earth is there
with all its boundless store that their 'work' would turn into wealth
if they could but get at it. They are kept idle because those who own
the country cannot find them employment at a profit to themselves,
because the blind, fatuous insanity of your 'system of trade' makes no
provision even for keeping its slaves in work."[125]

According to the Socialists, the employer of labour has no right to
work at a profit, and the capitalist has no right to demand rent or
interest. "The great central truth of S