If he preferred to work on “terra firma” he might get a job in a mine with only one shaft which in case of firedamp would be converted into a furnace. Then as there would be no way to get out, no socialistically inclined person would be able to dispute his individual right to stay in. If he preferred the white lead industry he might “get in” there, and there being no respirators, baths, or acidulated drinks he could be a physical wreck in a year and a corpse in two. Or he might try the gasworks and, there being no inspectors, there would be nothing to interfere with his individual right to be asphyxiated in an oven or roasted in a retort. As wages would be small, unions not being individualist institutions, he might get a cheap room in the top of an hotel without fire escapes, in a town with no fire engines. He could live cheaply on bread from bakehouses that never knew lime washings and had not seen hot water or soap for over six months, and eat fruit and vegetables handled by people who were not troubled with decent, let alone sanitary, lodgings. He would have the liberty to stay at manual labor as there would be no public schools or libraries to assist him to qualify for any profession such as, for instance, journalism. This would, no doubt, be a blessing in disguise, for if he became a writer, instead of following the brilliant example of Mr. Spencer, he might misuse his powers to the detriment of the race by advocating the limitation, or even the abolition, of child labor. If he married he might be at liberty to sew on his own buttons, his wife having left her fingers among the cogs of uncovered machinery. Such would be the social heaven, operated on the principles of the “Manchester” school of politics, which mark the high-water of Individualism, and of which Herbert Spencer was the chief apostle. Compare this attitude of mind with that of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, over whom Spencer had the advantage of the lapse of a period of seventy years. In 1815 Owen convened a large number of cotton manufacturers at Glasgow, Scotland, to consider the state of the cotton trade which was then in great distress. To that conference he presented two proposals; one to help the masters, the other to benefit the workers. The first was that they should petition parliament for the repeal of the tariff on raw cotton; the second that they should request parliament to shorten the working hours, and otherwise improve the conditions of workers in the mills. The first proposal carried unanimously, but the one on which Owen’s heart was set, was not even seconded. Knowing as he did the terrible condition of the English working class of that period, the callous brutality of these rapacious masters roused him to irony and defiance. He delivered an address to the conference which he had printed and spread broadcast in every corner of the country. This is how the lion turned on the jackals: