Page:The International Socialist Review (1900-1918), Vol. 1, Issue 1.pdf/19

Rh result is they get their midday meal half cooked; but there is no reason that I know of why they should be allowed to palm off this patent formula for procuring indigestion on credulous Americans. It is usually taken for granted that there is quite enough dyspepsia in the United States.

Now the truth is that in spite of the influence of collectivism on Municipal Councils, School Boards, County and District Councils and Poor Law Guardians, which after all is mainly due to the work of Social Democrats, the condition of the mass of the people is in many respects very bad. In fact, it is doubtful whether in the great cities of any other civilized country the bulk of the population is so wretchedly housed and the children of the poor so shamefully neglected as they are in the great cities of Great Britain. Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Bradford, etc., are in these respects little, if at all, better than the metropolis. What is more, no great improvement can be made until the whole problem is dealt with from the national point of view by the agency of a really democratic State or rather Commonwealth. And of any attempt being seriously made in this way, there is at present no sign whatever. In like manner the question of the unemployed is persistently pushed aside to a more convenient season, so that when a period of depression comes there is no effective machinery whatever for dealing with the mass of workers who are thrown into hopeless poverty by no fault whatever of their own. Owing to these and other causes vast sections of our city inhabitants are undergoing steady physical deterioration; to such an extent, indeed, is this the case that it is not too much to say that the majority of the adult males are unfit for military service. In some of the districts of the North, where volunteering and recruiting have been going on during this shameful war in South Africa, as many as per cent of those coming forward have been rejected as physically incapable. When to all this we add the testimony of the certifying surgeons in our manufacturing centres that the children exhibit less and less vigor and we know from statistics that a very large proportion of those who attend the Board Schools are insufficiently fed, it is scarcely necessary to cite further evidence in order to prove that mere municipalism and localism, however useful in some directions, has wholly failed to solve the pressing social problems of our modern capitalist. In Roubaix, Lille, and other French towns where the citizens have much greater power and use it with far greater effect than in any of our English cities, our French comrades of the Parti Ouvrier are under no delusions whatever as to the capacity and the limitations of mere municipalism.

Let it rather be frankly admitted that, notwithstanding the assiduous propaganda of the Federation for the