cases, as the reports of the Parliamentary investigation show,
the women dragged cars through passage-ways that were too low to admit
the use of ponies or mules.

England, mistress of the seas, proud carrier of the traffic of the
world, the center of international finance, the richest among all the
investing nations--England was reeking with poverty. Beside her
factories and warehouses were vile slums in which people huddled as
Ruskin said, "so many brace to a garret." There in the back alleys of
civilization babies were born and babies died, while those who survived
grew to the impotent manhood of the street hooligan.

The British Empire girdled the world. For a century its power had grown,
practically unchallenged. Superficially it had every appearance of
strength and permanence but behind it and beneath it were the hundreds
of thousands of exploited factory workers, the underpaid miners, the
Cannon Gate of Edinburgh and the Waterloo Junction of London.

Capitalist imperialism has not benefited the British workers. Quite the
contrary, the rise of the Empire has been accompanied by the
disappearance of the stalwart English yeoman; by the disappearance of
the agricultural population; by the concentration of the people in huge
industrial towns where the workers, no longer the masters of their own
destinies, must earn their living by working at machines owned by the
capitalist imperialists. The surplus derived from this exploited labor
is utilized by the capitalists as the means of further extending their
power in foreign lands.

Imperialism has brought not prosperity, but poverty to the plain people
of England.

There is another aspect of the matter. If these degraded conditions
attach to the workers in the center of the empire, what must be the
situation among the workers in the dependencies that are the objects of
imperial exploitation? Let the workers of India answer for Great
Britain; the workers of Korea answer for Japan, and the workers of Porto
Rico answer for the United States. Their lot is worse than is the lot of
the workers at the center of imperial power.

Empires yield profits to the masters and victory and glory to the
workers. Let any one who does not believe this compare the lives of the
workers in small countries like Holland, Norway, Denmark and
Switzerland, with the lives of the workers in the neighboring
empires--Russia, Germany, France and Great Britain. The advantage is all
on the side of th