Work is useless unless it be productive work. It would be work for a man to dig a hole and then fill it up again; but the work would be of no benefit to the nation. It would be work for a man to grow strawberries to feed the Duke of Argyll's donkey on, but it would be useless work, because it would add nothing to the general store of wealth. Policemen and gaolers are men withdrawn from the work of producing wealth to wait upon useless criminals. They, like soldiers and many others, do not produce wealth, but they consume it, and the greater the number of producers and the smaller the number of consumers the richer the State must be. For which family would be the better off--the family wherein ten earned wages and none wasted them, or the family in which two earned wages and eight spent them? Do not imagine, as some do, that increased consumption is a blessing. It is the amount of wealth you produce that makes a nation prosperous; and the idle rich man, who produces nothing, only makes his crime worse by spending a great deal. The great mass of the workers lead mean, penurious, and joyless lives; they crowd into small and inconvenient houses; they occupy the darkest, narrowest, and dirtiest streets; they eat coarse and cheap food, when they do not go hungry; they drink adulterated beer and spirits; they wear shabby and ill-made clothes; they ride in third-class carriages, sit in the worst seats of the churches and theatres; and they stint their wives of rest, their children of education, and themselves of comfort and of honour, that they may pay rent, and interest, and profits for the idle rich to spend in luxury and folly. And if the workers complain, or display any signs of suspicion or discontent, they are told that the rich are keeping them. That is not _true_. It is the workers who are keeping the rich. CHAPTER VII WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT It is no use telling you what _Socialism_ is until I have told you what it is not. Those who do not wish you to be Socialists have given you very false notions about _Socialism_, in the hope of setting you against it. They have brought many false charges against Socialists, in the hope of setting you against them. So you have come to think of _Socialism_ as a thing foolish, or vile, and when it is spoken of, you turn up your noses (instead of trying to see beyond them) and turn your backs on it. A friend offers to give you a good house-dog; but someone tells you it is mad. Your friend will be wise to satisfy you that the dog is _not_ mad before he begins to tell you how well it can guard a house. Because, as long as you think the dog will bite you, you are not in the frame of mind to hear about its usefulness. A sailor is offering to sell an African chief a telescope; but the chief has been told that the thing is a gun. Then before the sailor shows the chief what the glass is good for, he will be wise to prove to him that it will not go off at half-cock and blow his eye out.