---
Total 670

"That is, we have 640 members representing the interests of, say,
6,000,000 of persons, and 30 members representing the interests of
37,000,000."[573] "As recipients of rents, royalties, interests, and
dividends, some 600 of the representatives of the people in the House
of Commons are parasites upon the people's backs. The railway
shareholders have 78 representatives; the railway workers, nearly
400,000 strong, have one. One hundred and eighty thousand landed
proprietors have 155 members; 1,000,000 agricultural labourers have
one. Coal-mine owners have 21; and 655,000 miners have seven members.
The shipowners and builders have 22 representatives; the 200,000
sailors have none."[574]

"The social composition of the House of Commons is as follows: 124
lawyers, 108 manufacturers (including brewers, colliery-owners, &c.),
85 landowners, 64 merchants and shopkeepers, 37 army and navy men, 33
journalists and authors, 28 financiers, 23 professors, teachers, &c.,
18 Civil servants, 18 newspaper proprietors and publishers, 16 heirs
to the peerage, 67 of miscellaneous occupations and professions, and
50 working men. Thus the bulk of the present House of Commons consists
of rent, profit, and interest mongers and their hirelings and
hangers-on. The exploited masses of the people are only represented by
fifty men."[575]

See your masters, how unceasingly they strive to keep you down,
How they manage all your business up in Parliament and town;
Well, it is not quite your business, for it really is their own.
And that is why the millions of the toilers slave and groan.[576]

"On the top of all this political chicanery and impudent pretence of
popular representation, there sits an autocratic, irresponsible,
hereditary legislative body, consisting exclusively of idlers and
parasites who reserve to themselves the right of rejecting all laws
which do not clearly further their own exactions and monopolies! Then
ask yourselves: Of what use is Parliament? Of what use can it ever be
to the mass of the common people?"[577]

Parliament is not only useless to the worker, but is also, according
to the Socialists, utterly corrupt and callous to the sufferings of
the people. "Whenever an American is met abroad with the assertion
that government in the Republic is corrupt, he can safely say that for
one ounce of corruption in America