The Birkenhead News and Wirral General Advertiser. — 1907-09-14 (Birkenhead, Merseyside, England)

OUR POINT OF VIEW.  (B 7 a Socialist.)  Several local gentlemen having given their opinions and views on the movement which is known as Socialism, and their remarks having been duly reported in the columns of this paper, one or two observations thereon, that is. on Socialism, but from the Socialist point of view, may not prove uninteresting to those who read them columns and take an interest in economic matters  If we take only a casual look round us I to-day we can readily see that wealth is not being distributed at all as it should be. If we inquire further into the matter, we shall find that those who create the wealth of this country, the same applies to other countries, do not obtain anything like a fair share of what their labour has created, and if we inquire still deeper into the cause of things, we shall see this is so because the private ownership of land and capital give to the few the power to control the labour of the many, and to compel those who create wealth to Part with the wealth they have created. At the present moment, half the wealth of England is held by twenty-five thousand people. The other half is divided unequally among the remaining forty millions. Ten elevenths of all the land in Britain is owned by two hundred thousand of the population. The remaining forty millions have to rest content with one-eleventh of the land. Let us now go on to unemployment, and see if it can be explained why a man who is able and willing to work cannot get employment Unfortunately, there is a superstition very prevalent that those who really want employment can obtain it, if they try. All I have to say to that is, it is not true, as I will try to show. The private ownership of land, having driven the workers off the soil to swell the numbers of the labourers in our large industrial centres, and the advent of machinery having lessened the demand far hand labour, the problem of unemployment has thus come into being, creating what the capitalist calls "the great reserve army of Labour." The existence of a certain number of unemployed workmen is the basis of a competitive industrial order. The unemployed men, owing to the operation of the law of supply and demand, keep wage* down to the lowest possible level. On the other hand, if there are no unemployed, owing to the scarcity of labour, wages will rise to the highest possible point. But if you have a competitive system, you must have low wages, and to have low wages you must, as we have seen, also have unemployed men to keep wages down. Without 'the great reserve army of labour the wage system would drop to pieces, and the competitive industrial arrangement could not continue. Now then, of late years there has been brought forward, or, let me add, as far forward as it was possible to bring it, a remedy for unemployment. I refer, of course, to the POLITICAL NIGHTMARE  of the Conservative party, Protection; but I think I have made it plain that while I we have a system beilt on competition, unemployment must continue, as a necessity, to keep wages down. Therefore. Protec— tien is no remedy. The only solution lies in the rearrangement of our present industrial order We will now just take a brief look round at other social evils which exist in our midst, just to remind us what sort of a world we have made. We have all heard of the women chain makers of the Black Country. The women who make bricks. in South Staffordshire. You know it is impossible to pink up a paper without reading of deaths from starvation, or perhaps IMMO one committing suicide because they could not get employment, because no one could make a profit out of their labour. I wonder have you ever seen a canal boat woman scale the lock gates and push a heavilyladen barge with a twenty-foot pole? Women do that every day in England. I have heard of a woman with a child at her breast being knocked into the lock by a sodden blow of the tiller. I don't think all this is very womanly work, do you? I But, then, private enterprise does not coneider whether a thing is womanly or not. Our women may be degraded and trodden down, all that matters is Profit for the profit-monger. The following instances of "how the poor live" are taken from the East-end of London. I iscaherecl them whilst staying there a short time ago, and they mostly refer to women and children. For making match boxes Ad. a gross is paid, and find your own paste. I wonder how many smokers consider that when they fling their empty box away. Ninepenca a dozen for making I blouses is handsome pay. Fur sewing is done mostly by old women for lid, an hour, and a shirt finisher earns from threepence to fivepence a day, and has to work on Sunday to make a bare subsistence. The fanning of stay bones is paid for at the rate of 4d. per gross, and by working half the night me worker can do about two gross. This work is chiefly done by women and children, as I have already remarked. The instances I have given above, I have given purposely as the fact has long been borne in upon me that the women and children suffer most from the defects of our economic system. I am surprised that we men are not ashamed of it. One well-known writer in one of his books relates how. coming out of an art gallery where he had been looking at a picture of Andromache, he saw a white-haired Englishwoman go by with a great bag of cinders on her bent old back. Yes, I am astonished we men tolerate such a sad state of affairs, and amazed that the Church never raises its voice and uses its influenee toward something better. But the remedy! Ah, that is another question. The remedy lies in the nationalisation of the land and the collective control of the means of life, and that is Socialism. For men the right to work; for women and children the right to live and love as their Creator intended they should do. But I hear someone say