Page:The International Socialist Review (1900-1918), Vol. 1, Issue 1.pdf/21

Rh very fairly impartial to protect all sorts and conditions of men and women indifferently. What more do you want than freedom to struggle and starve?

11. Patriotism. We have had about a thousand years of successful manslaughter and piracy continuously, conquering all but men of our own race. "Rule Britannia," "God Save the Queen," "There's a Land that Bears a Name," etc., etc. All this balderdash is absorbed and given out in large doses especially among the poor and ignorant.

12. Religion. The Church has still an excellent innings and uses the great Catholic cathedrals, which it has "conveyed," wholly in the interests of the possessing classes. What the Anglicans fail to accomplish in this direction the fully achieve. The God of England is always the God of the rich.

13. Charity. This covers and is intended to cover a multitude of sins. It is twice cursed. It curses him who gives and him who takes. But helps to maintain class domination comfortably.

14. Absence of conscription. The freedom from this bloodtax, though beneficial from many points of view, helps to keep the people contented.

15. The national instinct for compromise due to our long parliamentary and constitutional history.

16. Our antiquated political arrangements. Our political forms are at least a hundred years behind our economic development. We have neither universal suffrage, one man one vote, second ballot, payment of election expenses and of members, nor any other complete democratic method of election.

17. Our wealthy political men deliberately debauch the poorer voters in the constituencies by indirect but continuous bribery, especially in hard times.

18. The English aristocracy are extremely dexterous and painstaking. They work together in the interests of their order. The poor English "love a lord."

19. There is in England to a larger extent than in any other country in the world a great buffer class, if so I may call it, whose members and their forbears have never from generation to generation taken part in direct capitalist exploitation at home. They have been landowners, professional men, officials, merchants, "squatters," etc. But they have never been actual  Hence they have no active sympathy with the capitalists as a class and modify the direct class antagonism and class war.

20. Drink, betting, love of games. These are terrible agents of the dominant minority, which the majority use against themselves.

21. Bourgeois Socialism. The Fabian Society, and to a less