war or in smaller military or naval operations in Europe, we shall have a grand total of about ten millions of men withdrawn from all useful or reproductive work, their lives devoted directly or indirectly to the Moloch of war, and who must therefore be supported by the remainder of the working community. PRESIDENT: It seems that Christian governments do not exist for the good of the governed, still less for the good of humanity or civilization, but for the aggrandizement and greed and lust of power of the ruling classes— kings and kaisers, ministers and generals, nobles and millionaires the true vampires of our civilization, ever seeking fresh dominions from whose people they may suck the very life-blood. SENATOR: You see it in the plague and famine running riot in India. PRESIDENT: To realize the horrors of Colonial expansion and of the doctrine of trade following the flag, read the Report of the Director-General of the Indian Medical Ser vice. About 70 per cent. of the whole native population (about 800,000) live in "chawls" or tenement houses of various sizes, the largest being six or seven stories high and holding from 500 to 1,000 people each. They consist on each floor, of a long corridor, with small rooms on each side about 8 feet by 12 feet, each room inhabited by a family, often five or six persons. SENATOR: The Calcutta report is worse. Six men and boys lived and cooked in a room 7 by 7 by 6 feet, which had no window and with filth and sewage all around. Of another street we read that the houses are built almost back to back. It would be nearly impossible to squeeze between them; sunlight is so far shut out that with broad daylight outside the gully it is absolutely impossible to do more than grope your way within these tenements. Rats run about here in the dark as they would at night; a heavy sickening odor pervades the whole place; walls and floors are alike damp with contamination from liquid sewage, which lies rotting and for which there is no escape. There are eight foolscap pages of this Report, going into even more horrible details. PRESIDENT: The exploitation of the workers for the benefit of the ruling caste-and both alike are among the most terrible failures of the century. SENATOR: This is the result; and what are Americans to think of a government of Imperialism that has allowed the erection of such tenements in the two chief cities of the Empire? A government which spends myriad millions on railroads, on gigantic armies, on frontier wars, for the annexation of South African republics, on colleges and schools, and on magnificent public buildings, while allowing a considerable proportion of the native population to live in such horribly insanitary conditions as to rival the worst plague-infected cities of Europe in the Middle Ages! All the European wars of the century have been due to dynastic squabbles or to obtain national aggrandizement, and were never waged in order to free the slave or protect the oppressed without any ulterior selfish ends. PRESIDENT: What is the annual produce of labor in England? SENATOR: The annual produce of labor from which the whole expenditures of the people necessarily comes is estimated at thirteen hundred and fifty millions sterling; and this amount is so unequally divided that one million persons among the wealthy receive more than twice as much of this income as the twenty-six millions constituting the manual-labor class. PRESIDENT: Twenty-six millions of England's industrial people existing with a minimum of the bare necessities of life! That is a commentary upon the commercial policy of Expansion and Imperialism. It exploits the home market to benevolently assimilate plague-infected markets abroad. In America under the fiscal policy of Indirect Taxation the inequality of classes is still greater than in England, there being 4,047 families of the rich who own about five times as much property as 6,599,796 families of the poor. SENATOR: The development of steam navigation, of railroads and telegraphs, of mechanical and chemical science, and the growth of the population, while enormously increasing productive power and the amount of material products-that is, of real wealth-at least ten times faster than the growth of the population, has given that enormous increase almost wholly to the one Power-holding Class, comprising the capitalists, leaving the actual producers of it-the industrial workers and inventors-little, if any, better off than before. If this tenfold increase of real wealth had been so distributed that all were equally benefited, then every worker would have had ten times as much of the necessaries and comforts of life, including a greater amount of leisure and enjoyment. PRESIDENT: What facts prove it? SENATOR: The statistics of Giffen, Mulhal, Leoni, Levi, and others. PRESIDENT: Under the British Imperial Colonial System of Expansion, one-third of the inhabitants of London did not have sufficient of the bare necessities of life. SENATOR: Civilization shudders at the Gold Standard founded on the inequality of man and the colonial expansion founded on underconsumption and illustrated by the condition of the London laborer. Have you read Alfred Russell Wallace, who ranks with Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall? His great work furnishes the texts for the gospel of Imperial and Colonial Expansion of despair. PRESIDENT: In relating the economic condition of the London laborer, for whose benefit the policy of Imperialism and Colonial Expansion has been ostensibly followed, England's great scientist declares (reads): Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amid horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship. To get into them you have to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all directions and often flowing beneath your feet; courts, many of which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air, and which rarely know the virtues of a drop of cleansing water. You have to ascend rotten staircases which threaten to give way beneath every step, and which in some places have already broken down. You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin. Then, if you are not driven back by the intolerable stench, you may gain admittance to the dens in which these thousands of beings, who belong as much as you to the race for whom Christ died, herd together. Every room in these reeking tenements houses a family or two! In one room a missionary found a man ill with smallpox, his wife just recovering from her confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. Here live a widow and her six children, two of whom are ill with scarlet fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters from twenty-nine years of age downward live, eat, and sleep together. And so the wretched and shameful story goes on, and the author assures us that these are not "selected cases," but that they simply show what is to be found "in house after house, court after court, street after street"; and that the accounts are in no way exaggerated, but are often toned down, because the actual facts are too horrible to be printed. A woman, And next, as to the work by which they live. trouser-making, can earn one shilling a day if she works seventeen hours at it. A woman with a sick husband and a child to look after works at shirt-finishing at 3d. a dozen and can earn barely 6d. a day. Another maintains herself and a blind husband by making match-loxes at 24d. a gross and has to pay a girl 1d. a gross to help her. Here is a mother who has pawned her four children's clothes, not for drink, but for coal and food. She obtained only a shilling, and bought seven pounds of coal and a loaf of bread! Think of the agony of distress a mother must have endured before she could do this! And the fifteen years that have passed, notwithstanding the "Royal Commission," leaves it all just as bad as before. This is what Sir Arthur Sherwell says in his recently published "Life in West London" as to the district north of Soho, where there are more than 100,000 persons living below "the margin of poverty": Even under normal conditions the pressure of poverty represented by these figures is extreme; but when, as in 1895, the winter is of exceptional severity, the pressure becomes intolerable. Many of the families lived for weeks on soup and bread from the various charitable soupkitchens in the neighborhood. Every available article of furniture or clothing was sold or pawned; in some cases the boots were taken off the children's feet and pawned for bread or fuel. A number of families, even in the bitterest times of the long frost, lived for days without fire or light, and often with no food but a chance morsel of bread or tea. One family had lived for weeks on bread and tea and dripping. In another room a family was found, consisting |