CHAPTER III. 



TO THE POOR. SCIENCE AND SOCIALISM. 



1. YOUR gospel is good, exclaims the modern socialist. 

 Science, we allow, has done much for man's collective, 

 and something for his individual, benefit. She has 

 multiplied man's material comforts and enjoyments, 

 increased the productive powers of labour, triumphed over 

 the destroying forces of Nature, mitigated the diseases 

 of the individual body ; and for all this she deserves 

 the thanks of mankind. But the diseases of the social 

 body, chronic and destroying : the crime, and want, and 

 poverty the fruitful parent of further crime, and vice, and 

 misery; the social sores and ulcerating wounds of the 

 modern body politic; the drunkenness; the degraded, 

 disease-fraught frames ; the still more degraded minds ; 

 the massed misery and shame of our great cities; the 

 pauperism and prostitution ; all this dismal, broadening 

 river of human want and wretchedness and shameless- 

 ness, scarcely if at all diminished by our vaunted civili- 

 zation or religion, even in its relative amount, while it 

 has vastly increased in absolute amount, while moreover, 

 the sufferers, having tasted the tree of knowledge, have 

 become more keenly alive to the fact of their nakedness 

 and misery, and while the race itself has at last awoke 

 to a keen consciousness of these shameful and intolerable 



