Britain for the British

by Robert Blatchford

Here is the idea as it has been expressed by a working man—

Up to now I had thought that the object of life was to live, and that the object of love was to love. But the economists have changed all that. There is neither love nor life, sentiment nor affection. The earth is merely a vast workshop, where all is figured by debit and credit, and where supply and demand regulates everything. You have no right to live unless the industrial market demands hands; a woman has no business to bring forth a child unless the capitalist requires live stock.

I cannot really understand a man selling his love and his manhood, and talking like a coward or a slave about "imprudent marriages"; and all for permission to drudge at an unwelcome task, and to eat and sleep for a few lonely and dishonourable years in a loveless and childless world.

You don't think that is going to save you, men, do you? You don't think you are going to make the best of life by selling for the sake of drudgery and bread and butter your proud man's right to work for, fight for, and die for the woman you love?

For, having sold your love for permission to work, how long will you be before you sell your honour? Nay, is it not true that many of you have sold it already?

For every man who works at jerry work, or takes a part in any kind of adulteration, scampery, or trade rascality, is selling his honour for wages, and is just as big a scamp and a good deal more of a coward than a burglar or a highwayman.

And the commercial travellers and the canvassers and the agents who get their living by telling lies,—as some of them do,—do you call those men?

And the gentlemen of the Press who write against their convictions for a salary, and for the sake of a suburban villa, a silk hat, and some cheap claret, devote their energies and talents to the perpetuation of falsehood and wrong—do you call those men?

If we cannot keep our foreign trade without giving up our love and our manhood and our honour, it is time the foreign trade went to the devil and took the British employers with it.

If the state of things in England to-day makes it impossible for men and women to love and marry, then the state of things in England to-day will not do.