They are very terrible facts, and the economic system
which generates them must be acknowledged to be
a very terrible system. A few examples of his choice
of facts will serve to explain the bitterness of many
Socialists:--
Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared,
as chairman of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms,
Nottingham, on the 14th January, 1860, ``that there was
an amount of privation and suffering among that portion
of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown
in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized
world. . . . Children of nine or ten years are dragged
from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o clock in
the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence
until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing
away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening,
and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like
torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.''[4]
[4] Vol. i, p. 227.
Three railway men are standing before a London coroner's
jury--a guard, an engine-driver, a signalman.
A tremendous railway accident has hurried hundreds of
passengers into another world. The negligence of the
employes is the cause of the misfortune.
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