lliant 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 on