se few and only the most sensual pleasures by its
wearying toil, must it not give itself over blindly and madly to those
pleasures? A class about whose education no one troubles himself, which
is a playball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life--what
incentives has such a class to providence, to "respectability," to
sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a remoter enjoyment, most
uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually varying, shifting
conditions under which the proletariat lives? A class which bears all
the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages,
one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects--who can
demand that such a class respect this social order? Verily that is
asking much! But the working-man cannot escape the present arrangement
of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists
it, the greatest injury falls upon himself.

Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker.
In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly
shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul
atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic
comfort is possible. The husband works the whole day through, perhaps
the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet
night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what
family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the working-man
cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the
consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic
quarrels, most demoralising for parents and children alike. Neglect of
all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too
common among the English working-people, and only too vigorously fostered
by the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this
savage way, amidst these demoralising influences, are expected to turn
out goody-goody and moral in the end! Verily the requirements are naive,
which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man!

The contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in its
extreme form--that of offences against the law. If the influences
demoralising to the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly
than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the
fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Reaumur. Unde