Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL Socialism is sometimes presented as though it were nothing but a proposal to make such economic changes in social structure as would eliminate poverty. This is only a partial statement of socialist aims, and yet it is true that the prevalence of excessive wealth and excessive poverty side by side is one of the chief causes of the success of the socialist propaganda. 1. To-day. Every town in the country affords some example of this contrast; every commercialist country in the world adds details to the picture. Apologists of the existing order sometimes excuse it, sometimes say that the individual is to blame, sometimes try and show that things are getting better. Mr. Mallock has been making guesses about family incomes recently for the purpose of showing that they are now fairly substantial and are rising.1 When the family income is not that of the "breadwinner" alone, it is avery flimsy foundation to give to progress. But even on such a foundation, strengthened as much as possible by generous estimates and by inadmissible statistical methods, Mr. Mallock has to admit that 350,000 families, containing 1,750,000 persons, have a total familyj income of £30 per annum—a sum which works out at a fraction over 2s. 3d. per head per week from which everything must be paid. There are hi addition 1,200,000 with an average family income of £94 per annum. In this figure Mr. Mallock includes the incomes of the members of these families who are living out as domestic servants! Without them, the income is £71 or about 6. per head per week, an altogether unsatisfactory figure and a somewhat miserable one even if it were earned by a single breadwinner. It is quite inadequate for bringing up a family. It gives no margin for sickness and unemployment, a...