THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 95 



damnation in the next, or both, are threatened by the 

 continuance of the state of things in which they have 

 been brought up. But when they do attain that convic- 

 tion, society becomes as unstable as a package of dyna- 

 mite, and a very small matter will produce the explosion 

 which sends it back to the chaos of savagery. 



It needs no argument to prove that when the price 

 of labour sinks below a certain point, the worker in- 

 fallibly falls into that condition which the French em- 

 phatically call la miser e a word for which I do not 

 think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a con- 

 dition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are 

 necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of 

 the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in 

 which men, women, and children are forced to crowd 

 into dens wherein decency is abolished and the most 

 ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible 

 of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are 

 reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in which the 

 pains accumulate at compound interest, in the shape of 

 starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral deg- 

 radation; in which the prospect of even steady and 

 honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with 

 hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave. 



That a certain proportion of the members of every 

 great aggregation of mankind should constantly tend to 

 establish and populate such a Slough of Despond as this 

 is inevitable, so long as some people are by nature idle 

 and vicious, while others are disabled by sickness or 

 accident, or thrown upon the world by the death of 

 their bread-winners. So long as that proportion is re- 

 stricted within tolerable limits, it can be dealt with; 

 and, so far as it arises only from such causes, its exist- 

 ence may and must be patiently borne. But, when the 

 organization of society, instead of mitigating this ten- 



