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 buy. So does a machine. It costs money to replace a slave. But a free labourer can be had for nothing—hundreds of him imploring to be taken on. The free labourer herds in slums where no rich man would keep his horse or his dog; and when he is old he is thrown "on the rates"—the compulsory charity of the State he has served. If it is proposed to give him an Old Age Pension of 5s. a week, a chorus of voices exclaim that he will be demoralised—they mean that he will not work so hard if he thinks he need not die in the workhouse.

We are waking up at last to the fact that an artificial system—which we dignify with the name of civilisation—is producing artificial degenerates, whom lack of good air and good food, and above all of hope, have made degenerate. For two hundred and fifty years we have been trying to account for poverty. Everything has been suggested, from idleness and vice to stage-coaches and tea-drinking. Arthur Young thought that poverty in villages was due in part to the drinking of tea; he frequently mentions that in a certain village they drink it twice a day. He had not then made his famous tour in France, and seen how sand may be turned into gold, when the sand is a man's own. Now, the poor drink something more fiery than tea—or than the beer which Young probably preferred to tea. Bad air, bad food, and the lack of hope in a man's life, easily lead to the craving for strong drink, and the strong drink completes the degeneration which the bad air and food began. And so we have an army of degenerates, of unemployed, who ought to be called unemployable, for they have been found unfit even for food for powder. This discovery has alarmed us. We see that if it goes on we shall lose our place among the nations. To this has too much civilisation brought us—that is, too much of the life of cities. Consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally, we have for generations been doing everything to destroy the wholesome balance of town and country, and we do not like the result.

But we have destroyed more than this. We have destroyed independence of character. How could it be otherwise? For centuries, the poor Englishman in an agricultural district has been gradually losing his place in the Commonwealth. As a serf, a "customary tenant," tied to the soil, he had a place in which he had a right to be, and a