me bankrupt than treat your
'hands' and your customers in the same way as your competitors treated
theirs? It may be that, so placed, you--being the noble-minded paragon
that you are--would have behaved unselfishly. But no one has any right
to expect you to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of other people who
would only call you a fool for your pains. It may be true that if any
one of the hands--Owen, for instance--had been an employer of labour,
he would have done the same as other employers. Some people seem to
think that proves that the present system is all right! But really it
only proves that the present system compels selfishness. One must
either trample upon others or be trampled upon oneself. Happiness
might be possible if everyone were unselfish; if everyone thought of
the welfare of his neighbour before thinking of his own. But as there
is only a very small percentage of such unselfish people in the world,
the present system has made the earth into a sort of hell. Under the
present system there is not sufficient of anything for everyone to have
enough. Consequently there is a fight--called by Christians the
'Battle of Life'. In this fight some get more than they need, some
barely enough, some very little, and some none at all. The more
aggressive, cunning, unfeeling and selfish you are the better it will
be for you. As long as this 'Battle of Life' System endures, we have
no right to blame other people for doing the same things that we are
ourselves compelled to do. Blame the system.

But that IS just what the hands did not do. They blamed each other;
they blamed Crass, and Hunter, and Rushton, but with the Great System
of which they were all more or less the victims they were quite
content, being persuaded that it was the only one possible and the best
that human wisdom could devise. The reason why they all believed this
was because not one of them had ever troubled to inquire whether it
would not be possible to order things differently. They were content
with the present system. If they had not been content they would have
been anxious to find some way to alter it. But they had never taken
the trouble to seriously inquire whether it was possible to find some
better way, and although they all knew in a hazy fashion that other
methods of managing the affairs of the world had already been proposed,
they neglected to inquire whether these other methods were possible or
practicable, and they w