head. But if
you say to him, "Look after the buttons on my top-hat," he will not do
it, though you empty a boot-shop over him. If you say to a schoolboy,
"Write out that Ode of Horace from memory in the original Latin," he
may do it without a flogging. If you say, "Write out that Ode of
Horace in the original German," he will not do it with a thousand
floggings. If you will not learn logic, he certainly will not learn
Latin. And the ludicrous laws to which the needy are subject (such as
that which punishes the homeless for not going home) have really, I
think, a great deal to do with a certain increase in their
sheepishness and short-wittedness, and, therefore, in their industrial
inefficiency. By one of the monstrosities of the feeble-minded theory,
a man actually acquitted by judge and jury could _then_ be examined by
doctors as to the state of his mind--presumably in order to discover
by what diseased eccentricity he had refrained from the crime. In
other words, when the police cannot jail a man who is innocent of
doing something, they jail him for being too innocent to do anything.
I do not suppose the man is an idiot at all, but I can believe he
feels more like one after the legal process than before. Thus all the
factors--the bodily exhaustion, the harassing fear of hunger, the
reckless refuge in sexuality, and the black botheration of bad
laws--combined to make the employee more unemployable.

Now, it is very important to understand here that there were two
courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted
by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have
reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope
of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to
his feet. In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more
money, more leisure, more luxuries, more status in the community, and
then trusted to the normal instincts of reasonably happy human beings
to produce a generation better born, bred and cared for than these
tortured types that were less and less use to him. It might still not
be too late to rebuild the human house upon such an architectural plan
that poverty might fly out of the window, with the reasonable prospect
of love coming in at the door. In short, he might have let the English
poor, the mass of whom were not weak-minded, though more of them were
growing weaker, a reasonable chance, in the form of more money,