CHAP. xx. THE DEMON OF GREED. 359 



Mr. Herbert V. Mills, fully explained in his " Poverty 

 and the State " nine years ago. 



A few years before his much-lamented death, that 

 acute yet cautious thinker, the late Professor Huxley, 

 was forced to adopt the conclusions of Professor Cairnes, 

 and those here set forth, that our modern system of land- 

 lordism and capitalistic competition tends to increase 

 rather than to diminish poverty; and he expressed them 

 in one of those forcible passages which cannot be too 

 often quoted. After declaring that in all great indus- 

 trial centres there is a large and increasing mass of what 

 the French call la misere, he goes on: 



"It is a condition in which 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 where decency is abolished, and the 

 most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are im- 

 possible 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 

 organization of society, instead of mitigating this tend- 

 ency, 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 large mass of 



