chin. And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation of industry and politics.
Environment
(From "Merrie England")
By Robert Blatchford
(This book is probably the most widely-circulated of Socialist
books in English. Over two million copies have been sold in Great
Britain, and probably a million in America. The author is the
editor of the London Clarion; born 1851)
Some years ago a certain writer, much esteemed for
his graceful style of saying silly things, informed us
that the poor remain poor because they show no efficient
desire to be anything else. Is that true? Are only the
idle poor? Come with me and I will show you where
men and women work from morning till night, from week
to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of their
powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor—aye,
destitute—have for their wages a crust of bread and rags.
I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using
the strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep
at night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted,
and fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce,
and the broken drudges filter through the poor-house or
the prison to a felon's or a pauper's grave! I will show
you how men and women thus work and suffer and faint
and die, generation after generation; and I will show
you how the longer and the harder these wretches toil
