THE REMEDY FOR WANT. 



387 



workers had to be supported. The first objection is absurd; because 

 the effect of this free bread would be to check and almost abolish 

 pauperization. It would enable the home to be kept up; it would 

 prevent that cruel mockery of the present poor-law system that the 

 home must be denuded or given up, the children's clothes pawned, 

 all self-respect lost, before relief is given. The second objection, if 

 valid, would be the strongest condemnation of our actual competitive 

 wage-system. But it is not valid. It is the pressure of absolute 

 hunger, of the still more cruel pang of seeing their children pining 

 for want of bread, that makes men and women consent to work for 

 anything they can get, and gives all the power to the sweater's trade. 

 The being able to hold out a week or a month would give strength 

 to the poor half-starved women and children now working their 

 lives out in misery and destitution. It w r ould give them power and 

 time to bargain. In each shop or factory they could combine. They 

 could afford to strike against oppression, which they dare not do 

 now, and the result would be a rise, not a fall of wages. But, for 

 some persons, that will be an equal objection; and as no one can tell 

 exactly what would happen except that starvation would be abolished, 

 perhaps it is simpler to ignore all such theoretical and imaginary 

 evils. Let us first stop the starvation, and leave other difficulties to 

 be dealt with as they arise. 



How to get tJie Funds. This question ought not to require asking, 

 in a country where there is such enormous accumulated wealth in 

 the hands of individuals that a large part of it is absolutely useless 

 to them, gives them no rational pleasure, and is, really and funda- 

 mentally, the cause of the very poverty we seek to abolish. 



There are now in Great Britain sixty-six persons whose incomes 

 from "trades and professions " are 50,000 a year and upward. 

 The total amount of the sixty-six incomes is 5,632,577, so that the 

 surplus, over 50,000 a year each, amounts to 2,332,577 a year. 

 Up to the end of thg last century it is probable that no one person in 

 Great Britain had an income of 50,000 a year. It would then have 

 been considered what Dr. Johnson termed "wealth beyond the 

 dreams of avarice," and even to-day it is far beyond what is suf- 

 cient for every luxury which one family ought to have or ought to 

 want. Surely, for the one purpose of giving BREAD to those who 

 need it, to save MILLIONS from insufficiency of food culminating in 

 absolute starvation, there can be few of these sixty-six who, when 

 appealed to by the humanity, by the intellect, and by the religion of 

 the nation, will refuse to give up this enormous superfluity of wealth 

 to the bread fund, to be taken charge of, perhaps, by the Local Gov- 



