“But why does he pretend, and go about talking like that, Mum? What does he do it for?”
“Because he wishes to live without working himself, dear.”
“And don’t the people know he’s only pretending?”
“Some of them do. Most of the idlers know that what the vicar says is not true, but they pretend to believe it, and give him money for saying it, because they want him to go on telling it to the workers so that they will go on working and keep quiet and be afraid to think for themselves.”
“And what about the workers? Do they believe it?
“Most of them do, because when they were little children like you, their mothers taught them to believe, without thinking, whatever the vicar said, and that God made them for the use of the idlers. When they went to school, they were taught the same thing: and now that they’re grown up they really believe it, and they go to work and give nearly everything they make to the idlers, and have next to nothing left for themselves and their children. That’s the reason why the workers’ children have very bad clothes to wear and sometimes no food to eat; and that’s how it is that the idlers and their children have more clothes than they need and more food than they can eat. Some of them have so much food that they are not able to eat it. They just waste it or throw it away.”
“When I’m grown up into a man,” said Frankie, with a flushed face, “I’m going to be one of the workers, and when we’ve made a lot of things, I shall stand up and tell the others what to do. If any of the idlers come to take our things away, they’ll get something they won’t like.”
In a state of suppressed excitement and scarcely conscious of what he was doing, the boy began gathering up the toys and throwing them violently one by one into the box.
“I’ll teach ’em to come taking our things away,” he exclaimed, relapsing momentarily into his street style of speaking.
“First of all we’ll all stand quietly on one side. Then when the idlers come in and start touching our things, we’ll go up to ’em and say, ‘’Ere, watcher doin’ of? Just you put it down, will yer?’ And if they don’t put it down at once, it’ll be the worse for ’em, I can tell you.”