constipation of conscience. There are many things it has done and
allowed to be done which it does not really dare to think about; it
calls them by other names and tries to talk itself into faith in a
false past, as men make up the things they would have said in a
quarrel. Of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome, and
though it is stifled, stinks: the true story of the relations of the
rich man and the poor in England. The half-starved English proletarian
is not only nearly a skeleton but he is a skeleton in a cupboard.

It may be said, in some surprise, that surely we hear to-day on every
side the same story of the destitute proletariat and the social
problem, of the sweating in the unskilled trades or the overcrowding
in the slums. It is granted; but I said the true story. Untrue
stories there are in plenty, on all sides of the discussion. There is
the interesting story of the Class Conscious Proletarian of All Lands,
the chap who has "solidarity," and is always just going to abolish
war. The Marxian Socialists will tell you all about him; only he isn't
there. A common English workman is just as incapable of thinking of a
German as anything but a German as he is of thinking of himself as
anything but an Englishman. Then there is the opposite story; the
story of the horrid man who is an atheist and wants to destroy the
home, but who, for some private reason, prefers to call this
Socialism. He isn't there either. The prosperous Socialists have homes
exactly like yours and mine; and the poor Socialists are not allowed
by the Individualists to have any at all. There is the story of the
Two Workmen, which is a very nice and exciting story, about how one
passed all the public houses in Cheapside and was made Lord Mayor on
arriving at the Guildhall, while the other went into all the public
houses and emerged quite ineligible for such a dignity. Alas! for this
also is vanity. A thief might become Lord Mayor, but an honest workman
certainly couldn't. Then there is the story of "The Relentless Doom,"
by which rich men were, by economic laws, forced to go on taking away
money from poor men, although they simply longed to leave off: this is
an unendurable thought to a free and Christian man, and the reader
will be relieved to hear that it never happened. The rich could have
left off stealing whenever they wanted to leave off, only this never
happened either. Then there is the story of the cunning Fabian who sat
on