Again I may quote the experience of Australia, where the workers have very great power. In Melbourne, alone, in 1913, I found 30,000 men unemployed; and there and in other cities the tainted area of poverty and distress was increasing. All the elaborate organisation and political power of the workers could not add to the sum of available work and thus absorb the surplus of labour. I am contending that until we do this we do not solve the poverty-problem. The chief cause of this appalling social disease is the inequality of natural endowment--either of muscle or nerve--in face of an unorganised system of production. There is not work, with regular and decent wage, for all. The weaker, the lazier, the more drunken, and the slower of intellect, are crowded out of the ranks and driven to casual employment. This is the tap-root of poverty, and the benefits secured for those who are in regular employment will not affect it. Thirdly, this labour-legislation will not touch the second chief root of poverty, the extreme inequality of the distribution of wealth. Since wealth is, in this regard, a fixed quantity,--we are not concerned here with the effect of fresh applications of science to production,--an accumulation of commodities at one point leads to thinness at another. I am not pleading for equality of income. Many workers have an exaggerated idea of the gain they might have by an equal distribution of wealth. The total annual income of the population of the United Kingdom is now believed to be about £2,400,000,000. If this were distributed equally amongst the heads of our ten million families and our large army of unmarried workers, the result would be barely £200 a year; and the equalisation of taxation, the granting of substantial pensions, etc., would further reduce it. There is, however, no serious need to discuss this idea. I see no moral principle which forbids that we should reward a man according to his productiveness or inventiveness or other value to the community, although his fellows are not responsible for their lesser capacity; and it is idle to speculate on some imaginary phase of human development in which the more gifted and more useful will refuse to be more richly rewarded than the less useful. But it does not follow that the community has no right to control the distribution of wealth. At one time such a proposal would have been branded "robbery." To-day even Conservatives do not threaten to remove the death-duties and graduated income-tax by which we confiscate some of the wealth of the more fortunate. The only question is, to what _extent_ we may or ought to prevent the excessive accumulation of wealth, or to disperse it after accumulation.