prevent it from manifesting itself in open and declared shape. That very decay of Parliamentarism and so-called representative government which is now apparent to all helps on and is in itself indicative of the coming change. Politics, it cannot be too often repeated, are but the outcome and manifestation of the form of production and the class antagonism below. No doubt the form of government reacts in part upon the production, as religious ideas in time react in the same way. But the conflict between the socialised system of production and the individualist system of exchange has in England reached a most critical point. Though the workers of all nations must of necessity combine in order to bring about a new and better system, England is the country where the economical evolution has reached its highest development, and where the reconstruction must consequently begin.

It is a noble rivalry in which all nations may fitly take a part. The day when an abstract theorist will be a practical statesman may never come; the day when the practical statesman can dispense with being a well-grounded theorist is gone by already. Nowhere is this more true than in our own country. For to sum up our present positionFirst. In no civilised country in the world is there such a monopoly of land as in Great Britain.

Second. In no country are capital, machinery, credit, and the means of production generally so concentrated in the hands of a class.

Third. In no country is there such a complete social separation between classes.

Fourth. In no country is the contrast between the excessive wealth and luxury of the few and the grinding and degrading poverty of the many so striking.

Fifth. In no country is the machinery of government so entirely in the hands of the non-producing classes, or are the people so cajoled out of voting power and due representation.

Sixth. In no country are the people so dependent for their necessary food on sources of supply thousands of miles

away.

Seventh. In no country is it so difficult for a man to rise out of the wage-earning class.

Eighth. In no country is justice so dear or its administration so completely in the hands of the non-producing classes who make the laws.*

Here then, are a series of indisputable facts, to which may be added the truth that the revolutionary character of our present system of production already noted is becoming more marked each day. Electricity threatens to subvert entirely the whole of our processes in every department of industry; education, imperfect as it is, teaches our workers to appreciate their surroundings, and circumstances force them to combine. No change can be for the worse in their condition. Let, then, all classes take account of the inevitable antagonism, and endeavour to help those who produce the wealth of the country to enter upon their inheritance without bloodshed, to the glory of England and to the benefit of all. Those who urge that class ought not be set against class, belong themselves to that very class which is producing and intensifying the antagonism they hypocritically deplore. Let the capitalists and their hangers-on, the landowners, strive with the workers for a peaceable change, and England may set an example of

* See "The Coming Revolution in England," in The North American Review, October, 1882.

peaceful reconstruction to the world. But at present there is very little sign of any such wise and far-sighted action on the part of the classes in possession; history teaches us that only resolute combination on the part of the oppressed classes has ever gained them anything. It is sad that the men in possession should be thus blind to their own best interests, and refuse to recognise facts in the society around them which point steadily in one direction. But with the

misery due to the existing system, it is impossible to hold any terms. That has reached a point where national decrepitude and decay must inevitably follow, unless wholesale changes are immediately brought about. These changes are being steadily prepared all the while by the very oppression and misery themselves, as well as by the new forces placed at the disposal of humanity. It is to the control of these forces by the whole community that we must look for improvement in the near future.

CHAPTER XI.

THE POOR LAWS.

THE Poor Laws, as has been well said, form and have formed for three hundred years a Socialist basis to English society. It has been in practice recognised throughout this long period that in sickness and in age men and women of the working or any other class could obtain shelter, food, and medicine at the cost of the community, that people out of employment should be maintained, and that destitute children should be taken care of, and to a certain extent educated. Provision for the helpless, food for the able-bodied out of work; these were the two sides to the English poor-law system, supplemented as it was by the efforts of private charity. That the system itself was often harshly and sometimes cruelly administered, that the parochial relief and law of settlement produced much injustice in many ways, and that at its best the whole arrangement is but a poor substitute for a proper organisation of labour by the producing class, all these drawbacks in nowise alter the fact that our poor laws are distinctly socialist in character, and founded upon the principle that the community has duties towards all its members, no matter how unthrifty or even how absolutely Of the causes

wasteful they may have been as individuals. which led up to vagrancy and permanent pauperism after the break-up of the peasant-proprietary of the fifteenth century a brief account has been given. Commerce and

manufactures helped to intensify the evil effects of the seizure of the land. In a rather obscure passage even Eden seems to have felt his way to this conclusion when he says, Manufacturers, although they added to the capital stock of the nation, yet by creating a necessity for free hands, and consequently enabling men to make use of the most valuable of all property, their own industry, subjected those who were in any way incapacitated from availing themselves of that fund to the miserable alternative of starving independently. Without the most distant idea therefore of disparaging the numberless benefits derived to this country from manufactures and commerce, the result of this investigation seems to lead to the inevitable conclusion that manufactures and commerce are the true parents of our national poor.' "'* But they were merely portions of the general growth of wealth, which crushed the many for the sake of the few, though unquestionably the necessity for "free" hands, that is to say, for a reserve of labour, owing to the continued expansion and contraction of the capitalist system, accounts for the permanence of pauperism in the midst of increasing riches.

It is not here necessary to go through the various statutes dealing with the relief of the poor before and after the famous Statute 43 Eliz. cap. 2, but the view taken of the poor in the eighteenth century, under aristocratic rule, and before the complete victory of middle-class economy, is well worthy of consideration. During the whole of the eighteenth century, even in the years immediately succeeding the formation of workhouses in 1723-which were set on foot owing to the increasing number of idlers who were maintained by the country-it was generally admitted by statesmen that the Eden, vol. i. p. 61.

*