ke.

This, then, is all that the bourgeoisie has done for the education of the
proletariat--and when we take into consideration all the circumstances in
which this class lives, we shall not think the worse of it for the
resentment which it cherishes against the ruling class. The moral
training which is not given to the worker in school is not supplied by
the other conditions of his life; that moral training, at least, which
alone has worth in the eyes of the bourgeoisie; his whole position and
environment involves the strongest temptation to immorality. He is poor,
life offers him no charm, almost every enjoyment is denied him, the
penalties of the law have no further terrors for him; why should he
restrain his desires, why leave to the rich the enjoyment of his
birthright, why not seize a part of it for himself? What inducement has
the proletarian not to steal! It is all very pretty and very agreeable
to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the "sacredness of property"
asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out
of itself. Money is the god of this world; the bourgeois takes the
proletarian's money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No
wonder, then, if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer
respects the sacredness and power of the earthly God. And when the
poverty of the proletarian is intensified to the point of actual lack of
the barest necessaries of life, to want and hunger, the temptation to
disregard all social order does but gain power. This the bourgeoisie for
the most part recognises. Symonds {115a} observes that poverty exercises
the same ruinous influence upon the mind which drunkenness exercises upon
the body; and Dr. Alison explains to property-holding readers, with the
greatest exactness, what the consequences of social oppression must be
for the working-class. {115b} Want leaves the working-man the choice
between starving slowly, killing himself speedily, or taking what he
needs where he finds it--in plain English, stealing. And there is no
cause for surprise that most of them prefer stealing to starvation and
suicide.

True, there are, within the working-class, numbers too moral to steal
even when reduced to the utmost extremity, and these starve or commit
suicide. For suicide, formerly the enviable privilege of the upper
classes, has become fashionable among the English workers, and numbers of
the poor kill themselves to avoid the misery fro