372 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CHAP. 



to provide the scantiest necessaries for their families. 

 They now possess an amount of political power sufficient 

 to overturn governments which do not satisfy them, and 

 year by year they are becoming more able to make 

 effectual use of that power ; and it becomes more and more 

 evident that, unless some real and great improvement 

 in their condition is soon effected, very drastic, and per- 

 haps dangerous, attempts at reform will be made. 



To those who watch the growing enlightenment of the 

 workers, it is clear that they will not much longer be 

 satisfied with mere administrative reforms, or with petty 

 palliatives which in no way touch the real causes of their 

 unhappy condition. Many of them have learnt enough of 

 political economy to know that the whole of the wealth 

 annually consumed by the nation is the annual product of 

 the labour, physical and mental, of the working classes ; 

 and that, j ust in proportion to the number of the non- 

 producers and to the extent that labour is expended on 

 the useless luxuries of pleasure, pomp, and fashion, to that 

 extent are they deprived of the product of their labour 

 and have to live in comparative penury. They begin to 

 see clearly that hereditary wealth of all kinds, and especially 

 the possession of land, enabling millions to live luxurious 

 and idle lives, is the fundamental cause of the poverty of 

 the workers, and the time will soon come when they will 

 determine that this state of things must cease. They do 

 not wish to rob any one of what he has been allowed by law 

 and custom to consider his own, but they will not consent 

 to the indefinite continuance of hereditary idlers any more 

 than of hereditary legislators. They will probably say, as 

 they will be perfectly justified in saying, " We recognize 

 no rights in any portion of the next generation to live 

 upon the labour of others. No child born after the passing 

 of this Act shall inherit land, nor any greater amount of 

 wealth than is necessary for a thorough education and such 

 an endowment as to give him a fair start in life." 



Such radical opinions as these are common among the 

 workers, but they are also spreading beyond them, owing 

 to the efforts of many talented and energetic thinkers, 

 who expound analogous views with eloquence in the lecture 



