SHROPSHIRE AND JACK MYTTON 175 



right, it implies that inequality of opportunity is right, and 

 that " the law of social justice " as laid down by Herbert 

 Spencer is not a just law. It implies that it is right for one 

 set of individuals, thousands or millions in number, to be able 

 to pass their whole lives without contributing anything to the 

 well-being of the community of which they form a part, but 

 on the contrary keeping hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of 

 their fellow men and women wholly engaged in ministering 

 to their wants, their luxuries, and their amusements. Taken 

 as a whole, the people who thus live are no better in their 

 nature — physical, moral, or intellectual — than other thousands 

 who, having received no such inheritance of accumulated 

 wealth, spend their whole lives in labour, often under exhaust- 

 ing, unhealthful, and life-shortening conditions, to produce the 

 luxuries and enjoyments of others, but of which they them- 

 selves rarely or more often never partake. Even leaving out 

 of consideration the absolute vices due to wealth on the one 

 hand and to poverty on the other, and supposing both classes 

 to pass fairly moral lives, who can doubt that both are 

 injured morally, and that both are actually, though often 

 unconsciously, the causes of ever-widening spheres of de- 

 moralization around them? If there is one set of people 

 who are tempted by their necessities to prey upon the rich, 

 there is a perhaps more extensive class who are in the same 

 way driven to prey upon the poor. And it is the very 

 system that produces and encourages these terrible inequali- 

 ties that has also led to the almost incredible result, that 

 the ever-increasing power of man over the forces of nature, 

 especially during the last hundred years, while rendering 

 easily possible the production of all the necessaries, comforts, 

 enjoyments, and wholesome luxuries of life for every indi- 

 vidual, have yet, as John Stuart Mill declared, " not 

 diminished the toil of any worker," but even, as there is 

 ample evidence to prove, has greatly increased the total mass 

 of human misery and want in every civilized country in the 

 world. 



And yet our rulers and our teachers — the legislature, the 

 press, and the pulpit alike — shut their eyes to all this terrible 



