Present-day Socialism in England seems to have risen to sudden magnitude from vacuity, to have permeated this cautious island over night. For over a generation all Socialism had disappeared from view. The elaborate schemes of Owen, the altruistic propaganda under the gentle Kingsley and his noble companion Maurice, the artistic revolt against the ugliness of commercialism led by Ruskin, who even shared the toil of the breakers of stones to prove his sincerity--all these movements seem suddenly to have disappeared from the face of the island, like a glacial current dropping suddenly, without warning, into the depths of the Moulin. England was given over to a highly prosperous industrialism. The Manchester doctrine was enthroned. Commercialism and a glittering pseudo-humanitarian internationalism found expression in the alternating victories of the astute Disraeli and the grandiloquent Gladstone. Meanwhile poverty and misery infested the underplaces of the land, a poverty and misery that was appalling. Every protester was proudly pointed to the repeal of the corn laws, the revision of the poor laws, the reform act of 1832, and the factory acts. When Sir Henry Vane had ascended the scaffold which his sacrifice made historic, he said: "The people of England have long been asleep; when they awake they will be hungry." When the England of to-day awoke it was to a greater hunger than the politically starved Roundhead or Cavalier ever endured. It is no figure of speech to speak of hungry England. Its brilliant industrialism has always had a drab background of want. Chiozza Money says of the present position of labor: "The aggregate income of the 44,500,000 people in the United Kingdom in 1908-9 was approximately £1,844,000,000; 1,400,000 persons took £634,000,000; 4,100,000 persons took £275,000,000; 39,000,000 persons took £935,000,000."[2] And he sums up the condition as follows: "The position of the manual workers in relation to the general wealth of the country has not improved. They formed, with those dependent upon them, the greater part of the nation in 1867, and they enjoyed but about forty per cent. of the national income, according to the careful estimate of Dudley Baxter. To-day, with their army of dependents, they still form the greater part of the nation, although not quite so great a part, and, according to the best information available, they take less than forty per cent. of the entire income of the nation." Although during this time the national income had increased much faster than the rate of population, "the Board of Trade, after a careful examination of the question of unemployment in 1904, arrived at the general conclusion that 'the average level of employment during the last 4 years has been almost exactly the same as the average of the preceding 40 years.'"[3]