XXIII THE SOCIAL QUAGMIRE 415 



is very low wages, or if nominally higher wages, then 

 intermittent work ; and thus we find in all great cities — 

 in New York, Chicago, London, Vienna, for example, in 

 each recurring winter — many thousands of men out of 

 work, and either partially supported by charity or under- 

 going slow starvation. Now I propose to show that these 

 terrible phenomena pervading all modern civilizations 

 alike — speculation, capitalism, compulsory idleness of those 

 willing to labour, women and children starving or killed by 

 overwork — all arise as the natural consequences and direct 

 results of private property, and consequent monopoly, of 

 land. This is the one identical feature in the social 

 economy of modern civilizations, and it alone is an 

 adequate cause for an identity of results when so many of 

 the social and political conditions in the great civilized 

 communities of to-day are not identical but altogether 

 diverse. 



We must always remember that the existence of large 

 numbers of surplus labourers, which is at once the in- 

 dication and the measure of poverty, is a purely artificial 

 phenomenon. There is no surplus, as regards land and 

 natural products waiting to be transmuted by labour into 

 various forms of wealth ; there is no surplus, as regards 

 demand for this wealth by those in want of all the 

 comforts and many of the barest necessaries of life, and 

 who only ask to be allowed to call those necessaries into 

 existence by their labour. The only surplus is a surplus 

 as regards demand for labourers by capitalists, a surplus 

 which owes its existence wholly to artificial conditions 

 which are fundamentally wrong. It is not a natural but a 

 man-created surplus, and all the want and misery and 

 crime that spring from it is equally man-created, and 

 altogether unnatural and unnecessary.^ 



^ In his most admirable and thoughtful work. Poverty and the State, 

 Mr. Herbert V. Mills relates how he was led to study the subject by 

 finding in three adjoining houses in Liverpool a baker, a tailor, and 

 shoemaker, all out of work. They all wanted l)read and clothes and 

 shoes ; all were anxious to work to supply their own and the others 

 wants. But the social system of which they formed a part did not 

 permit of their so working for each other, the alleged reason being that 

 there was already an overstocked market of all these commodities ; 



