Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/37

 have now occurred every ten years since 1825, and owing to these, men and women have been continually thrown out of work and flung into misery from no fault whatever of their own.

The introduction of fresh machines is similarly against workers, tending as it does to increased uncertainty of employment and to reduce skilled workers to a lower class. Thus the tendency is to produce not merely a destitute proletariat forced to remain as a class wage-slaves to their masters, body-slaves to the machine, their life long; but also a fringe of labour employed at scant wages in "good times," thrown into pauperism and starvation in bad. Hence freedom of contract between those who have no means of production, and those who have a monoply of them, simply involves the most terrible economical tyranny the world has yet seen: the surplus value provided under this illusory freedom out of unpaid labour enables the idle classes and their dependants to live in luxury at the expense of persistent overwork and misery for the producers themselves.

Thus individual exchange uncontrolled by thought of collective advantage brings about fearful anarchy in every direction, which is a satire indeed upon the middle-class cuckoo cry of "order, order."

Children are ill-nurtured and underfed, women are worked to within a few hours of pregnancy, the conditions of existence for the mass of the people are such that health, happiness, and morality are impossible, and still the capitalist class and their champions, the political economists, tell us that such is the inevitable outcome of our mock civilisation, Nor is there any real standard of honour among the competitors for wealth themselves.