第149章

For several weeks everybody in the town was in raptures over this tea -or, rather, everybody except a miserable little minority of Socialists, who said it was bribery, an electioneering dodge, that did no real good, and who continued to clamour for a halfpenny rate.

Another specious fraud was the `Distress Committee'.This body - or corpse, for there was not much vitality in it - was supposed to exist for the purpose of providing employment for `deserving cases'.One might be excused for thinking that any man - no matter what his past may have been - who is willing to work for his living is a `deserving case': but this was evidently not the opinion of the persons who devised the regulations for the working of this committee.Every applicant for work was immediately given a long job, and presented with a double sheet of foolscap paper to do it with.Now, if the object of the committee had been to furnish the applicant with material for the manufacture of an appropriate headdress for himself, no one could reasonably have found fault with them: but the foolscap was not to be utilized in that way; it was called a `Record Paper', three pages of it were covered with insulting, inquisitive, irrelevant questions concerning the private affairs and past life of the `case'

who wished to be permitted to work for his living, and all these had to be answered to the satisfaction of Messrs D'Encloseland, Bosher, Sweater, Rushton, Didlum, Grinder and the other members of the committee, before the case stood any chance of getting employment.

However, notwithstanding the offensive nature of the questions on the application form, during the five months that this precious committee was in session, no fewer than 1,237 broken-spirited and humble `lion's whelps' filled up the forms and answered the questions as meekly as if they had been sheep.The funds of the committee consisted of ?00, obtained from the Imperial Exchequer, and about ?50 in charitable donations.This money was used to pay wages for certain work - some of which would have had to be done even if the committee had never existed - and if each of the 1,237 applicants had had an equal share of the work, the wages they would have received would have amounted to about twelve shillings each.This was what the `practical' persons, the `business-men', called `dealing with the problem of unemployment'.

Imagine having to keep your family for five months with twelve shillings!

And, if you like, imagine that the Government grant had been four times as much as it was, and that the charity had amounted to four times as much as it did, and then fancy having to keep your family for five months with two pounds eight shillings!

It is true that some of the members of the committee would have been very glad if they had been able to put the means of earning a living within the reach of every man who was willing to work; but they simply did not know what to do, or how to do it.They were not ignorant of the reality of the evil they were supposed to be `dealing with' -appalling evidences of it faced them on every side, and as, after all, these committee men were human beings and not devils, they would have been glad to mitigate it if they could have done so without hurting themselves: but the truth was that they did not know what to do!

These are the `practical' men; the monopolists of intelligence, the wise individuals who control the affairs of the world: it is in accordance with the ideas of such men as these that the conditions of human life are regulated.

This is the position:

It is admitted that never before in the history of mankind was it possible to produce the necessaries of life in such abundance as at present.

The management of the affairs of the world ?the business of arranging the conditions under which we live - is at present in the hands of Practical, Level-headed, Sensible Business-men.

The result of their management is, that the majority of the people find it a hard struggle to live.Large numbers exist in perpetual poverty: a great many more periodically starve: many actually die of want: hundreds destroy themselves rather than continue to live and suffer.

When the Practical, Level-headed, Sensible Business-men are asked why they do not remedy this state of things, they reply that they do not know what to do! or, that it is impossible to remedy it!

And yet it is admitted that it is now possible to produce the necessaries of life, in greater abundance than ever before!

With lavish kindness, the Supreme Being had provided all things necessary for the existence and happiness of his creatures.To suggest that it is not so is a blasphemous lie: it is to suggest that the Supreme Being is not good or even just.On every side there is an overflowing superfluity of the materials requisite for the production of all the necessaries of life: from these materials everything we need may be produced in abundance - by Work.Here was an army of people lacking the things that may be made by work, standing idle.