perhaps compel your master, to give you a fairer or a larger wage?” “If he would only time an article,” is the doubtful reply; “state how long the article would take to make, and give you a certain wage of so much an hour, it would be fair, if it was only a living wage; we only want to live.” This “want to live” is the endurance, not of the “unemployables,” but of those who are engaged night and day in an insect-like activity: uncomplaining, with an Eastern endurance, in the dark. Investigation amongst the “sample” witnesses who appeared before the Committee exhibited no contradiction of their veracity. “I wanted to say about the girl C----,” says the investigator, “whose father is out of work, that her home was visited, and that practically everything in it has been pawned: they are owing money, of course, and are expecting the bailiffs in, so that she is at a crisis in her affairs. The girl C---- has hardly any clothes, and when we found her she was almost starving. She is really in a very bad position. She has her old father, who hawks her goods sometimes in the evening, and that is how she makes some extra money.” Of another G----. “I cannot find out myself,” is the testimony, “how she can subsist at all.” “How she manages to support herself and her child is an ‘absolute mystery.’” “She looks rather starved herself at present.” Even where some kind of organisation exists, it is found almost impossible to arouse these industrious persons to any visions or hopes of permanent betterment. “In going about among them,” says one witness, concerning the Nottingham lace makers, “I have found that the first difficulty you had to overcome was the abject apathy that existed among them. You see they are most of them, very many of them, working for the next meal, and nothing you say about the meal for to-morrow affects them: they are not concerned about that. After you have aroused some interest in them, you have also to arouse some sort of courage.”[12] So, while the white hotels rise on all the shores of England, and the apparatus of pleasure is developing into ever new and ingenious forms of entertainment, continues through the nights and days the grey struggle of the Abyss. It is the indomitable will to live, resisting always that press of circumstance which would squeeze out the life of the disinherited, and leave a solitude where once was industry and action. The question how long such will survive, in the depths, the absence of all that life should mean, is as unanswerable as the question how long the will to live will survive the satiety at the summit which comes from superfluity of pleasure. For a society fissured into an unnatural plentitude on the one hand finds as its inevitable consummation a society fissured into an unnatural privation on the other. Here is the “price of prosperity” as interpreted at the dim foundations of the social order; a menace to the future, less in the fury of its revolt than through the infection of its despair.