a little higher up, among the middle-men distributors of the necessaries and luxuries of life, bribery, adulteration, and various forms of petty dishonesty are rampant.
And higher yet, among the great Capitalists, the merchant Princes, the Captains of industry, we find hard taskmasters who drive down wages below the level of bare subsistence, and who support a more gigantic and widespread system of gambling than the world has ever seen.
And, finally, our administration of what we call "Justice" (and of which we are so proud because our judges cannot be bribed) is utterly unjust, because it
is based on a system of money fees at every step; because it is so cumbrous and full of technicalities as to need the employment of attorneys and counsel at great cost, and because all petty offences are punishable by fine or imprisonment, which makes poverty itself a crime while it allows those with money to go practically free.
Taking account of these various groups of undoubted facts, many of which are so gross, so terrible, that they cannot be overstated, it is not too much to say that our whole system of society is rotten from top to bottom, and the Social Environment as a whole, in relation to our possibilities and our claims, is the worst that the world has ever seen.
Such are the evil products of the social environment we have ourselves created in the course of a single century. We have seen it going from bad to worse, and have applied petty remedies here and there during the whole period; but the evils have continued to increase. It has now become clear to the more intelligent of the workers that if we wish to improve it—if we wish to prevent it from getting even worse than it is—we must deal with
the root-causes of the evil and, so far as possible, reverse the conditions which are so demonstrably bad, such hideous failures. And, fortunately, this is by no means so difficult as it may seem to be, because a large body of our thinkers and a considerable number of our workers see clearly what these root-causes are, and, less clearly, how to remedy them. They will, however, give their energetic support to any Government that devotes itself to the task of remedying them. The following are my own views as to how the problem must be attacked in order to solve it thoroughly and permanently.
The Root-cause and the Remedy
If we review with care the long train of social evils which have grown up during the nineteenth century, we shall find that every one of them, however diverse in their nature and results, is due to the same general cause, which may be defined or stated in a variety of different ways:
(1) They are due, broadly and generally, to our living under a system of universal competition for the means of