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POABIAN TRACTS

IC

Nos. I to 139.

THE TRACTS ARE BOUND IN ORDER OF NUMBER.

ARE OUT OF PRINT OR WITHDRAWN.

THOSE MISSING

PUBLISHED BY THE FABIAN SOCIETY

FROM 1884 TO 1908.

TO BE OBTAINED AT

THE FABIAN OFFICE, 3 CLEMENT'S INN, STRAND,

LONDON, W.C.

PRICE 4s. 6d.

i

Why are the Many Foor?

WE live in a competitive society with Capital in the

hands of individuals. What are the results ? A Hew are very rich, some well off, the MAJORITY IN *POVERTY, and a vast number in misery.

Is this a just and wise system, worthy of humanity? Can we or can we not improve it?

Hitherto it has escaped condemnation only because we are so ready to accept established custom, and because such general ignorance prevails both as to the evils to which our industrial disorder inevitably gives rise and as to our power to avert them.

The competitive system, which leaves each to struggle against each, and enables a few to appropriate the wealth of the community, is a makeshift which perpetuates many of the evils of the ages of open violence, with an added plague of tricks of trade so vile and contemptible that words cannot adequately denounce them.

What can be said in favor of a system which breeds and tolerates the leisured " masher," who lives without a stroke of useful work; the wage-slave workers, who toil for the mere mockery of a human life; the abject pauper and the Ishmael-minded criminal;-which makes inevitable and constant a three-cornered duel of dishonesty between the producer, the middleman, and the consumer?

What is Capital ?

It is the sum of our instruments of production, and of the advantages of the work of former years. Its use is to be found in devoting it to the benefit of all; its abuse in leaving it in the hands of a few to waste its revenues in their own personal gratification. The present system gives to the few the power to take from the workers a huge portion of the product of their labor

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