Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/46

 the middle-class is so high that their chief diseases arise from gluttony or drink.

Yet at this very time official returns prove conclusively that vast masses of our countrymen are living on the very verge of starvation; that much of the factory population is undergoing steady physical deterioration; that the agricultural labourers rarely get enough food to keep them clear of diseases arising from insufficient nourishment; while such is the housing of the wage-earners in our great cities and in our country districts that even the leading partisans of our political factions at length have awakened to the fact that civilisation for the poor has been impossible for nearly two generations under these conditions, and that some steps ought really to be taken to remedy so monstrous an evil. Drink, debauchery, vice, crime inevitably arise under such conditions. For indigestion arising from bad food, cold arising from insufficient firing, depression arising from unhealthy air and lack of amusement, necessarily drive the poor to the public-house; while even the sober have had, too often, no education which should fit them for the full enjoyment of life. And drunken and sober, virtuous and vicious—if they can be called vicious who are steeped in immorality from their very babyhood—are all subject to never-ceasing uncertainty of earning a livelihood, due to the constant introduction of fresh machines over which they have no control, or to the great commercial crises which come more frequently and last for a longer time at each recurrence. There is therefore complete anarchy of life and anarchy of production around us. Order exists, morality exists, comfort, happiness, education, as a whole, exist only for the class which has the means of production, at