428 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



permanently, by giving them free access to land — the pri- 

 mary source of all food and all wealth — in the form of 

 cottage homesteads around all cities, towns, and villages, by 

 which they may be enabled to provide food for their families 

 and to carry on such home industries as they may find con- 

 venient. Thus only will it be possible for them to enter into 

 really '* free contracts " with capitalists ; thus only can we 

 get rid of the great army of the unemployed, and ensure to 

 the worker a much larger proportion of the p: oduct of his 

 labour. 



When these two great radical reforms have been effected 

 in every part of the country, the industrial classes of every 

 kind will have before them a vista of permanent well-being 

 and progressive prosperity. Many industries now carried on 

 in factories, for the benefit of the individual capitalist, can 

 be just as well prosecuted in the home of the worker, if 

 " power " to work his machine is supplied to him. And so 

 soon as there is a demand for such power it will be supplied, 

 either by compressed air or water, or by electricity. A hun- 

 dred looms, or knitting frames, or spinning mules, can be 

 worked quite as well in separate houses as in one large build- 

 ing, with the enormous advantage to the worker that he 

 could work at them during winter or in wet weather or at 

 times when he would be otherwise idle, while carrying on 

 another occupation out of doors in summer or in fine weather. 

 At such machines different membersof the family could work 

 alternately, thus giving them all the relaxation derived from 

 diversity of occupation, and the interest due to the fact that 

 the whole product of their labour would be their own. In 

 the case of those processes that require to be carried on in 

 special buildings and on a larger scale, the workers could 

 combine to erect such a building in their midst, and carry on 

 the work themselves, just as they carry on co-operative 

 cheese and butter making in so many parts of the world 

 already. And, gradually, as men came to enjoy the health 

 and the profit derived from varied work, and especially the 

 pleasure which every cultivator of the soil feels in the 

 products he sees grow daily as the result of his own labour, 

 there seems no reason to doubt that co-operation of the 

 kind suggested would spread, till the greater part or the 



