e productive forces of the nation and quarters
himself on them as a parasite: he withdraws also a body of
propertyless men and places them in the same position except that
they have to earn this anti social privilege by ministering to his
wants and whims. He thus creates and corrupts a class of
workers--many of them very highly trained and skilled, and
correspondingly paid--whose subsistence is bound up with his
income. They are parasites on a parasite; and they defend the
institution of private property with a ferocity which startles
their principal, who is often in a speculative way quite
revolutionary in his views. They knock the class war theory into a
cocked hat [I shall show below that class war Socialists, on the
contrary, have always recognized, the existence of these facts,
"whilst the present system lasts."--W. E. W.] by forming a powerful
conservative proletariat whose one economic interest is that the
rich should have as much money as possible; and it is they who
encourage and often compel the property owners to defend themselves
against an onward march of Socialism. Thus we have the phenomenon
that seems at first sight so amazing in London: namely, that in the
constituencies where the shopkeepers pay the most monstrous rents,
and the extravagance and insolence of the idle rich are in fullest
view, no Socialist--nay, no Progressive--has a chance of being
elected to the municipality or to Parliament. The reason is that
these shopkeepers live by fleecing the rich as the rich live by
fleecing the poor. The millionaire who has preyed upon Bury and
Bottle until no workman there has more than his week's sustenance
in hand, and many of them have not even that, is himself preyed
upon in Bond Street, Pall Mall, and Longacre.

"But the parasites, the West End tradesman, the West End
professional man, the schoolmaster, the Ritz hotel keeper, the
horse dealer and trainer, the impresario and his guinea stalls, and
the ordinary theatrical manager with his half-guinea ones, the
huntsman, the jockey, the gamekeeper, the gardener, the coachman,
the huge mass of minor shopkeepers and employees who depend on
these or who, as their children, have been brought up with a
little crust of conservative prejudices which they call their
politics and morals a