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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 86
One-half the Wealth they Produce
One-half the Wealth they Produce
to a parasitic class, before providing for the maintenance of themselves and their proper dependents.
Is a healthy existence secured for society by this arrangement?
The income of the manual labor class is less than £40 per adult, and out of this they must pay heavy rents for the houses they live in. How much is left for healthy life? Even that little is not always vouchsafed to them. There are in London now at least 35,000 adult men who with their families (say 100,000) are slowly starving for want of regular employment.
"At present the average age at death among the nobility, gentry, and professional classes in England and Wales is 55 years; but among the artizan classes of Lambeth it only amounts to 29 years; and whilst the infantile death-rate among the well-to-do classes is such that only 8 children die in the first year of life out of 100 born, as many as 30 per cent. succumb at that age among the children of the poor in some districts of our large cities. The only real cause of this enormous difference in the position of the rich and poor with respect to their chances of existence lies in the fact that at the bottom of society wages are so low that food and other requisites of health are obtained with too great difficulty." (Dr. C. R. Drysdale, "Report of Industrial Remuneration Conference," p. 130).
One in five of Londoners dies in the workhouse, hospital, or lunatic asylum; one in fourteen of the manual labor class is a pauper, or has been one.
"Anyone who is acquainted with the suite of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme .... that condition which the French call la misére a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing, which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state, cannot be obtained; in which men, women and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave. . . . When the organisation of society, instead of mitigating this tendency, tends to continue and intensify it, when a given social order plainly makes for evil and not for good, men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try a fresh experiment. I take it to be a mere plain truth that throughout industrial Europe there is not a single large manufacturing city which is free from a vast mass of people whose condition is exactly that described, and from a still greater mass, who, living just on the edge of the social swamp, are liable to be precipiuited into it."