benefits of
civilization. One of the causes is--the majority of the population are
engaged in work that does not produce those things; and most of what IS
produced is appropriated and wasted by those who have no right to it.

'The workers produce Everything! If you walk through the streets of a
town or a city, and look around, Everything that you can
see--Factories, Machinery, Houses, Railways, Tramways, Canals,
Furniture, Clothing, Food and the very road or pavement you stand upon
were all made by the working class, who spend all their wages in buying
back only a very small part of the things they produce. Therefore what
remains in the possession of their masters represents the difference
between the value of the work done and the wages paid for doing it.
This systematic robbery has been going on for generations, the value of
the accumulated loot is enormous, and all of it, all the wealth at
present in the possession of the rich, is rightly the property of the
working class--it has been stolen from them by means of the Money
Trick.'...

For some moments an oppressive silence prevailed. The men stared with
puzzled, uncomfortable looks alternately at each other and at the
drawings on the wall. They were compelled to do a little thinking on
their own account, and it was a process to which they were
unaccustomed. In their infancy they had been taught to distrust their
own intelligence and to leave 'thinking' to their 'pastors' and masters
and to their 'betters' generally. All their lives they had been true
to this teaching, they had always had blind, unreasoning faith in the
wisdom and humanity of their pastors and masters. That was the reason
why they and their children had been all their lives on the verge of
starvation and nakedness, whilst their 'betters'--who did nothing but
the thinking--went clothed in purple and fine linen and fared
sumptuously every day.

Several men had risen from their seats and were attentively studying
the diagrams Owen had drawn on the wall; and nearly all the others were
making the same mental efforts--they were trying to think of something
to say in defence of those who robbed them of the fruits of their toil.

'I don't see no bloody sense in always runnin' down the rich,' said
Harlow at last. 'There's always been rich and poor in the world and
there always will be.'

'Of course,' said Slyme. 'It says in the Bible that the poor shall
always be with us.'

'What the bloody '