SOCIALISM AND PAUPERISATION.
[To Tom EDITOR OF T LIZ " BP ROTATOR."' SIR,—At the end of the fifth leader in last week's issue of the Spectator is a sentence for which many scores of thousands of London's poor are deeply indebted to you. It me : "We must never forget that the chief sufferers from Socialistic experiments are not the rich, but the poor." As one of that very large and almost entirely unconsidered class of London's workers just kept on the weather side of want by incessant work for fifteen years, I have preached to my fellows from the text I have just quoted from your article. I know, for I have felt it, how the iron enters into the very soul of the striving London ratepayer, mechanic or clerk or salesman or small shopkeeper, who, loving decent living, strives by night and day to provide things honest in the sight of all men, to clothe his children respectably, and to give them food which, if coarse, is at least sufficient. These men have no grudge against employers or Government or aristocracy, but they hate with a hatred all the more fierce because of its helpless- ness the people calling themselves Socialists who recklessly heap up burdens upon their shoulders until, despairing, they sink beneath them. I have heard Lady Warwick assert at a banquet that it was the duty of the State to feed and clothe as well as educate every child of the poor, and I longed to ask her what she understood by the State,—whether she knew that, in London at any rate, it meant the humble workers who were willing and industrious, and who dreaded the pauperisation of themselves or their children more than death, yet who were gradually crushed down into that bottomless pit by the ever-growing burden of rates expended by utterly irre- sponsible men of the type of Mr. Will Crooks and Mr. George Lansbury, and women like Lady Warwick. The Socialists do not care; they are as cruel and tyrannical to the class I have endeavoured to speak for as any Eastern despot; but I do hope that the rulers of Britain will awake to the fact that this great substantial body of quiet, earnest workers are gradually being crushed . into pauperism by Socialistic experiments, and that once down they cannot arise. I have only spoken of London, which I know and love, but doubtless other great towns could tell their own tale.—I am, Sir, &c., F. T. BULLEN.
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