162   HISTORIC GROWTH OF MIAN.

RIGHTS OF WEALTH.   163

to the few, while poverty was the hopeless lot of the masses. In the greatest and wealthiest city of the world, the Prime Minister said that "there were two hundred thousand people who do not have as good a place to sleep as we ordinarily give to a horse ! " " In a large and increasing body of the population, misery reigns supreme," says Prof. I-Iuxley.

ARE NOT THINGS BETTER in the United States,

where the people themselves are the supreme law-makers, and where for a century they have established liberty and equality? Alas ! they are not enough better to be worth mentioning.

But the statesmen, the political economists and the newspapers do their best to persuade the people that here every man has an equal chance with the rest to acquire wealth ; that it is a man's own fault, his lack of industry, thrift and judgment, if he does not gather wealth and the comforts and luxuries for himself and family. Let us look at this proposition a moment and we shall perceive its vicious and hateful falsehood. In any of the ordinary industries, in anything except mining, a man by his own labor cannot in forty years accumulate more than ten thousand dollars. In most of the industries he could not accumulate three thousand. At the end of that time, this amount would give him a small cottage and a lot of his own.

His ONLY CHANCE for getting rich is by employing others and making a profit out of their labors. Anybody can do this who wants to, they tell us. Very well. Suppose now that everybody, all the working people, decide that they want to get rich. So they all become employers. They do not wor

with their own hands. Now who is left to do the work? They all had a right to be masters instead of workmen, according to the popular teaching.

We see that such teaching was a wicked falsehood, invented to delude the masses with the idea that they had individual liberty, freedom of choice and equal opportunities. In the United States a man's chance of getting moderately rich is only one in three hundred

The affairs of industry, of production and distribution, have been left in the hands of capitalists with nothing to control them but their own selfish interests, actually responsible to nobody and boasting that they can buy up legislatures. A great journal openly asserts that for fifty years no question in Parliament has been settled or discussed on the basis of its justice and right, but only on that of its expediency. The capitalists assert their right to dictate and regulate the scale of wages, and to keep this down to as low a point as they choose, the workmen having no rights in the case except to submit. The vast aggregations of capital place the workmen and the small capitalist at the utmost disadvantage.

In Britain and America it is conceded that the people, through their chosen representatives, have a right to make such laws as they like. And this right

direly includes THE RIGHT TO EXAMINE AND DISCUSS THE BASIS OF ALL RIGHT AND JUSTICE. The

people have a right to know if there is not some system of wealth and industry that would secure the material conditions of happiness for all the people, for every human being, and not, as at present, merely for a small and limited class of persons. Many mil-