Imagine the dispossessed to be ideally perfect cowards, the possessors to consider nothing whatsoever except the buying of their labour in the cheapest market--and the system would break down from the death of children and of out-o'-works and of women. You would not have a State in mere decline such as ours is. You would have a State manifestly and patently perishing. As a fact, of course, Capitalism cannot proceed to its own logical extreme. So long as the political freedom of all citizens is granted the freedom of the few possessors of food to grant or withhold it, of the many non-possessors to strike any bargain at all, lest they lack it: to exercise such freedom fully is to starve the very young, the old, the impotent, and the despairing to death. Capitalism must keep alive, by non Capitalist methods, great masses of the population who would otherwise starve to death; and that is what Capitalism was careful to do to an increasing extent as it got a stronger and a stronger grip upon the English people. Elizabeth's Poor Law at the beginning of the business, the Poor Law of 1834, coming at a moment when nearly half England had passed into the grip of Capitalism, are original and primitive instances: there are to-day a hundred others. Though this cause of insecurity--the fact that the possessors have no direct incentive to keep men alive--is logically the most obvious, and always the most enduring under a Capitalist system, there is another cause more poignant in its effect upon human life. That other cause is the competitive anarchy in production which restricted ownership coupled with freedom involves. Consider what is involved by the very process of production where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few whose motive for causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of the wealth created but the enjoyment by those possessors of surplus value or "profit." * * * * *