202 ENGLISH SAGA

to buy his own home. The utilitarian state had given him oppor-
tunity and he had taken it.

But the skilled artisan in employment was only a part of
labour. For if laissez-faire postulated the successful workman
growing rich like his master through his own thrift and industry,
it also necessitated a residue of unskilled labour to meet the
fluctuating demands of a competitive world. This the capitalist
used in good time and discarded in bad. Such a system multiplied
the wastrel, the diseased and the ne'er-do-well. It multiplied
their inefficient and unhappy posterity. The statistics of the
economist showed the profits of unrestricted competition. The
slums of the industrial cities revealed its wastage.

It was no part of laissez-faire that the successful should burden
themselves by helping the failures. The only economic place for
the weak was the rubbish heap. It was at this point that laissez-
faire always clashed with the English temperament. The middle-
class employer in the rarefied privacy of his sanctum might—in
the interests of a higher wisdom—suppress his inherited feelings
of charity and kindness. But the working man who had never
heard of laissez-faire could not. He never even tried. For he was
nothing if not sentimental, and under his corduroys beat a heart
full of English instincts and prejudices. One of them was an
incorrigible desire to help the underdog.

It was from such a motive, unreasoning and unscientific, that
English socialism first sprang. Abroad socialism followed more
logical channels: the brand that Karl Marx was preaching to his
fellow Germans and to embittered and excitable French and
Russian comrades was of a severely practical kind. There was
nothing that Marx1 despised and disliked so much as an underdog.
He merely wished to use him and his misery to destroy the cap-
italist system. What would happen to the wretched, snivelling,
inefficient creature in the bloody process never troubled him.
For the underdog like the bourgeois was himself a product of the
capitalist system. Only when he was swept away would the brave
new world of the revolutionary logicians' vision become possible.
To waste tears on him, let alone effort, was a crime against the
classless society of the future.

But English Socialists, even when they paid polite lip service

1 Marx despaired of the English, * England," he wrote, * possesses all the necessary
conditions for social revolution; what she lacks is a universal outlook and revolu-
tionary passion.*—.£. A GUT, Sari Mane, 79.