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Chapter 7 - Socialism -
From Poverty by James Platt

P145 Socialism.

efforts are directed to make the people to consider their surroundings, and arouse them to the necessity of class combinations or class warfare, in the hope of bettering their social position. "Nationalisation of the land," the "land for the people," has developed into a demand which is making itself heard. But this is only the thin edge of the wedge; once you put aside the "vested interest" in land, you have taken the first stop towards the nationalisation of all other private ownerships in
 
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anything. "Capitalist robbery" will follow "landlord robbery," and Communism is the inevitable result, once the people believe that rent by the landlord and profit by the capitalist is a robbery from them of their natural rights.

"In five years we reach the date of 1889. Two hundred years before saw the middle-class monarchical revolution of 1689 in England; a century later came the first outbreak of the great French Revolution of 1789. That year, 1889, will be celebrated by the workers in every industrial city throughout the civilized world as the time for a new and strenuous effort; not in the interest of the 'gamesters who play with one another for the labour of the poor, not to continue power and luxury and case to the meanest class that has ever held control in the history of human civilization, but to conquer for the mass of mankind complete control over steam, electricity, and the other forces of nature which the progress of science is placing at the command of the race. The development of these forces, and the influence which they exert on the peoples of the world, constitute the real revolution of today. It is for us to take full account of their action, to educate our countrymen around us to a knowledge of their growth, and to organize, without rest and without haste, that certain victory of the people which shall be the real revolution of to-morrow " (H. M. HYNDMAN: " Today," January, 1884.)

To properly estimate the danger of such appeals as the above, we must remember that nothing is so conducive to recklessness as poverty. The poor have little to conserve, and little to hope for. It wants brains to recognize the fact that the majority of

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Sociology

Poverty - by James Platt

© Peter Smith 2008