第150章

Willing to work; clamouring to be allowed to work, and the Practical, Level-headed, Sensible Business-men did not know what to do!

Of course, the real reason for the difficulty is that the raw materials that were created for the use and benefit of all have been stolen by a small number, who refuse to allow them to be used for the purposes for which they were intended.This numerically insignificant minority refused to allow the majority to work and produce the things they need; and what work they do graciously permit to be done is not done with the object of producing the necessaries of life for those who work, but for the purpose of creating profit for their masters.

And then, strangest fact of all, the people who find it a hard struggle to live, or who exist in dreadful poverty and sometimes starve, instead of trying to understand the causes of their misery and to find out a remedy themselves, spend all their time applauding the Practical, Sensible, Level-headed Business-men, who bungle and mismanage their affairs, and pay them huge salaries for doing so.Sir Graball D'Encloseland, for instance, was a `Secretary of State' and was paid ?,000 a year.When he first got the job the wages were only a beggarly ?,000, but as he found it impossible to exist on less than ?00 a week he decided to raise his salary to that amount; and the foolish people who find it a hard struggle to live paid it willingly, and when they saw the beautiful motor car and the lovely clothes and jewellery he purchased for his wife with the money, and heard the Great Speech he made - telling them how the shortage of everything was caused by Over-production and Foreign Competition, they clapped their hands and went frantic with admiration.Their only regret was that there were no horses attached to the motor car, because if there had been, they could have taken them out and harnessed themselves to it instead.

Nothing delighted the childish minds of these poor people so much as listening to or reading extracts from the speeches of such men as these; so in order to amuse them, every now and then, in the midst of all the wretchedness, some of the great statesmen made `great speeches' full of cunning phrases intended to hoodwink the fools who had elected them.The very same week that Sir Graball's salary was increased to ?,000 a year, all the papers were full of a very fine one that he made.They appeared with large headlines like this:

GREAT SPEECH BY SIR GRABALL D'ENCLOSELANDBrilliant Epigram!

None should have more than they need, whilst any have less than they need!

The hypocrisy of such a saying in the mouth of a man who was drawing a salary of five thousand pounds a year did not appear to occur to anyone.On the contrary, the hired scribes of the capitalist Press wrote columns of fulsome admiration of the miserable claptrap, and the working men who had elected this man went into raptures over the `Brilliant Epigram' as if it were good to eat.They cut it out of the papers and carried it about with them: they showed it to each other:

they read it and repeated it to each other: they wondered at it and were delighted with it, grinning and gibbering at each other in the exuberance of their imbecile enthusiasm.

The Distress Committee was not the only body pretending to `deal' with the poverty `problem': its efforts were supplemented by all the other agencies already mentioned - the Labour Yard, the Rummage Sales, the Organized Benevolence Society, and so on, to say nothing of a most benevolent scheme originated by the management of Sweater's Emporium, who announced in a letter that was published in the local Press that they were prepared to employ fifty men for one week to carry sandwich boards at one shilling - and a loaf of bread - per day.

They got the men; some unskilled labourers, a few old, worn out artisans whom misery had deprived of the last vestiges of pride or shame; a number of habitual drunkards and loafers, and a non-descript lot of poor ragged old men - old soldiers and others of whom it would be impossible to say what they had once been.

The procession of sandwich men was headed by the Semi-drunk and the Besotted Wretch, and each board was covered with a printed poster:

`Great Sale of Ladies' Blouses now Proceeding at Adam Sweater's Emporium.'

Besides this artful scheme of Sweater's for getting a good advertisement on the cheap, numerous other plans for providing employment or alleviating the prevailing misery were put forward in the columns of the local papers and at the various meetings that were held.Any foolish, idiotic, useless suggestion was certain to receive respectful attention; any crafty plan devised in his own interest or for his own profit by one or other of the crew of sweaters and landlords who controlled the town was sure to be approved of by the other inhabitants of Mugsborough, the majority of whom were persons of feeble intellect who not only allowed themselves to be robbed and exploited by a few cunning scoundrels, but venerated and applauded them for doing it.