Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/46

38 to enter factories, mines, etc., as hired labourers. It is thought to be a feat of statesmanship to invent and impose taxes which shall drive them into doing this, and also to encourage methods of commerce which, by creating false wants, shall tempt them into expenditure only to be met by submission to hired labour. Then these primitive people—thus driven into mines or factory labour, and often even on some pretext actually deprived of their land—enter into formidable competition with the British landless labourer, who is thus caught as in a vice.

The first duty of the British workers is to refrain from entering the Army or Navy, these being the tools whereby their landowning class defend their own possessions at home, and exploit and seize on the land of others abroad. The British working man has been too often misled into rejoicing in the evil of war on the pleas that it “increases employment” and “gives new fields tor labour,” while he has remained blind to the fact that within the last twenty years millions of acres in his own country have passed out of cultivation and become mere playgrounds for the exploiters of industry.

Henry George said well that is “until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action, and where there is correct thought, right action will follow.” Therefore, be the land question in Great Britain ever so peculiarly complicated, everybody there can further its solution by studying his own ideals and revising them. At present, something which is miscalled “philanthropy” is the British idol, made up of horrible misconceptions of duty and right living, ana needing to be utterly overthrown. Men who drive labourers off the land, that they may shoot birds—men who make their wealth from employing workmen in poisonous conditions, if only they build hospitals or contribute to churches—are called “philanthropists,” bowed down to, and upheld in honour for the emulation of the young. The men who trap the workmen’s earnings by their breweries and distilleries, or who sell opium to China, or who receive rents from toiling peasants in South America, that they and their womenkind may spend these in vulgar insensate luxury in London or Paris, deserve a larger share of the same social opprobrium which now befalls the racecourse thimble rigger, the robber of the blind or the receiver of stolen goods. But at present they do not get this from the majority of their countrymen, who are far from having entered into that blessed enlightenment described by the ancient prophet, “when the vile person shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.”