Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/95

Rh You may take a big jump through history, from primitive to feudal, from feudal to modern times; and you will still find the same interests strong in every state, using their inherited control of wealth, of organisation, and of law, to extract advantage to themselves from the weaker, and the less educated members of the community; and always doing it in the name of the commonwealth—the strength and stability of the State. Only the other day (in a State as advanced as any in its democratic faith and its doctrine of equality for all—the United States of America) the moment there was a temporary breakdown in the legal safeguards against child-labour—there was a great organised rush in certain States of conscripted child-labour into industry—conscripted not by the State but by capital, exploiting the increased need of the wage-earning classes brought about by the raised prices of war.

The men who do that kind of thing (and they are men of great power and influence in the State) still only love their neighbours as their chattels, and still take advantage of all forms of law, or absence of law, to keep established as far as they can the conditions of social slavery. You may say that a thing like that lies outside the law, or that it is an abuse which legislation has not yet overtaken and put an end to; but what is more important and more significant is that it is an abuse which public opinion in those States where it was done had