Page:Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.djvu/45

 When Linden was gone downstairs again, Philpot, having finished what remained of the beer and hidden the bottle up the chimney, resumed the work of stopping up the holes and cracks in the ceiling and walls. He must make a bit of a show to-night or there would be a hell of a row when Misery came in the morning.

Owen worked on in a disheartened, sullen way. He felt like a beaten dog.

He was more indignant on poor old Linden's account than on his own, and was oppressed by a sense of impotence and shameful degradation.

All his life it had been the same: incessant work under similar more or less humiliating conditions, and with no more result than being just able to avoid starvation.

And the future, as far as he could see, was as hopeless as the past; darker, in fact, for there would surely come a time, if he lived long enough, when he would be unable to work any more.

He thought of his child. Was he to be a slave and a drudge all his life also? It would be better for the boy to die now.

As Owen thought of his child's future, there sprung up within him a feeling of hatred and fury against the majority of his fellow workmen.

They were the enemy—those ragged trousered philanthropists who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to their miserable slavery for the benefit of others, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion of reform.

They were the real oppressors—the men who spoke of themselves as 'the likes of us,' who, having lived in poverty and degradation all their lives, considered that what had been good enough for them was good enough for the children they had been the means of bringing into existence.

He hated and despised them, because they calmly saw their children condemned to hard labour and poverty for life, and deliberately refused to make any effort to secure better conditions for them than they had for themselves.

It was because they were indifferent to the fate of their children that he would be unable to secure a natural and human life for his. It was their apathy or active opposition that made it impossible to establish a better system of society, under which those who did their fair share of the world's work would be honoured and rewarded. Instead of helping to 33