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succeeds in raising himself from a state of 

 wage- earning to that of foreman or employer, 

 can in a long life of privations accumulate at 

 the most a few hundred pounds. Those men, 

 however, who without industrial discoveries 

 due to their own talent accumulate millions 

 in a few years can only be unscrupulous 

 business men, if we except a few strokes of 

 good luck, and it is these parasites bankers 

 and public speculators who live most grandly, 

 who are decorated or placed in official posts 

 as the reward of their honest transactions. 



The immense majority who work, only 

 receive a sustenance that barely suffices to 

 keep them from dying of hunger ; they live in 

 the back shops, the garrets, in the tumble- 

 down lanes of great towns, in the hovels in 

 the country that are not wanted as cow-sheds 

 or stables for horses. 



To this we must add the horrors of unem- 

 ployment, the most painful and frequent of 

 the three symptoms of this equality in misery 

 which is spreading in the modern economic 

 world, in Italy and elsewhere, in a more or less 

 intense form. 



I speak of the always increasing army of 

 those out of work in agriculture and in trade 

 and manufactures, of those thrown out of the 

 class of small householders, and of those who 

 are dispossessed of their little landed property 

 by taxes, debts, or usury. 



It is therefore not accurate to state that 

 socialism asks for all citizens material and 

 positive equality of work and possessions. 



