What guerdon has the State provided for the massed populations who have the very riches they create thus turned into an instrument for their impoverishment? One looks for that guerdon in vain. The vast majority of them are consigned to a life of privation from birth to death. Factories pour heavenward the smoke which lies over our cities as a pall, and in the gloom men and women toil with bloodless faces producing the goods which, elaborate and costly, or cheap and nasty, crowd the markets of all the world. But ten millions of the toilers go shivering through life ever tottering on the verge of the precipice of want. Over one and a half millions of them were rated as paupers in the years before the war. In the old Roman world half the population were slaves, but three-fourths of our population are virtually slaves. For the man who marries and has children, who is forced into a slum, and is {92} once chained to the chariot of modern machinery, there is no escape. 'Man is born free,' declared Rousseau, 'and is everywhere in chains.' No chains of slavery were ever more degrading than those forged in our day. Systems of indoor sweating found for their antidote the pauper system of outdoor relief. England, that struck the shackles off the African slaves, forged shackles for her own children. The conditions of the modern slaves are in a sense worse than that of the Roman serf. For the Roman slaves often laboured in noble toil, building temples which have defied the corroding power of time and which still inspire the heart with admiration and awe. But these slaves of to-day build nothing that endures. The cities of their labour might perish to-morrow, but in their perishing no beauty would disappear from the earth. The very efforts which the toilers have made to improve their state have been movements of blindness and folly. They have organised {93} far-reaching systems by which they seek through the limitation of output to improve their condition. The gate through which they press towards deliverance is the gate of dishonesty. That is the proof of the servitude not of body only, but of mind and spirit, to which they have been brought. 'I do not hesitate to express the opinion,' wrote Huxley in 1890, that if there is no hope of a large improvement in the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral degradation amongst the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole thing away as a desirable consummation.' Since then, wealth has enormously increased, science has triumphed more and {94} more over nature, but the increase of the one and the triumph of the other have only produced an increase