You don't think _that_ is going to save you, men, do you? You don't think you are going to make the best of life by selling for the sake of drudgery and bread and butter your proud man's right to work for, fight for, and die for the woman you love? For, having sold your love for permission to work, how long will you be before you sell your honour? Nay, is it not true that many of you have sold it already? For every man who works at jerry work, or takes a part in any kind of adulteration, scampery, or trade rascality, is selling his honour for wages, and is just as big a scamp and a good deal more of a coward than a burglar or a highwayman. And the commercial travellers and the canvassers and the agents who get their living by telling lies,--as some of them do,--do you call those _men_? And the gentlemen of the Press who write against their convictions for a salary, and for the sake of a suburban villa, a silk hat, and some cheap claret, devote their energies and talents to the perpetuation of falsehood and wrong--do you call _those_ men? If we cannot keep our foreign trade without giving up our love and our manhood and our honour, it is time the foreign trade went to the devil and took the British employers with it. If the state of things in England to-day makes it impossible for men and women to love and marry, then the state of things in England to-day will not do. Well, do you still think that single life, a crust of bread, and rags, will alone enable you to hold your own and to keep your foreign trade? And do you still think that poverty is a mark of unworthiness, and wealth the sure proof of merit? If so, just read these few lines from an article by a Tory Minister, Sir John Gorst-- The "won't-works" are very few in number, but the section of the population who cannot earn enough wages all the year round to live decently is very large. Professional criminals are not generally poor, for when out of gaol they live very comfortably as a rule. There are wastrels, of course, who have sunk so low as to have a positive aversion to work, and it is people of this kind who are most noisy in parading their poverty. The industrious poor, on the other hand, shrink from exposing their wretchedness to the world, and strive as far as possible to keep it out of sight. Now, contrast those sensible and kindly words with the following quotation from a mercantile journal:-- The talk about every man having a right to work is fallacious, for he can only have the right of every free man to do work if he can get it.