Page:Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.djvu/344

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists 'Seems to me as if 'e's swallered a bloody dictionary,' remarked Dick Wantley.

'Horder, horder!' shouted the chairman, banging the pail with the plumber's hammer.

'Socialism,' continued Owen, 'is not a wild dream of Superhuman Unselfishness. No one will be asked to sacrifice himself for the benefit of others or to love his neighbours better than himself, as is the case under the present system, which demands that the majority shall be content to labour and live in wretchedness for the benefit of a few.

'Under existing circumstances the community is exposed to the danger of being invaded and robbed and massacred by some foreign power. Therefore the community has organized and owns and controls an Army and Navy to protect it from that danger. Under existing circumstances the community is menaced by another equally great danger: the people are mentally and physically degenerating from lack of proper food and clothing. Socialists say that the community should undertake and organize the business of producing and distributing all these things; that the State should be the only employer of labour and should own all the factories, mills, mines, farms, railways, and fishing fleets.

'Socialists say that the community should undertake the business of providing suitable dwellings for all its members, that the State should be the only landlord and that all the land and all the houses should belong to the whole people.

'The hundreds of thousands of pounds that are yearly wasted in well meant but useless charity accomplish no lasting good, because while charity deals with the symptoms it ignores the disease, which is the private ownership of the means of producing the necessaries of life, and the restriction of production by a few selfish individuals for their own profit. And for that disease there is no other remedy than the public ownership and cultivation of the land; the public ownership of the mines, railways, canals, ships, factories, and all other means of production; and the establishment of an Industrial Civil Service, a National Army of Industry, for the purpose of producing the necessaries, comforts and refinements of life in all the abundance which has been made possible by science and machinery for the use and benefit of the whole of the people.' 332