The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface to the American Edition, By H. G. Wilshire
• Preface to the English Edition, By G. B. Shaw
• The Basis of Socialism
• Historic By Sidney Webb Ll.b., Barrister At Law, Lecturer On Political Economy At the City of London College.
• The Development of the Democratic Ideal.
• The Disintegration of the Old Synthesis.
• The Period of Anarchy.
• The Intellectual and Moral Revolt, and Its Political Outcome.
• Revision of Taxation.
• Extension of Factory Acts.
• Educational Reform.
• Re-organization of Poor Law Administration.
• Extension of Municipal Activity.
• Amendment of Political Machinery.
• The New Synthesis.
• Industrial. By William Clarke M.A. Cambridge.
• Moral76 By Sidney Olivier B.a., Oxford.
• Economic By G. Bernard Shaw
• Rent.
• The County Family.
• The Proletariat.
• Exchange Value.
• Wages.
• Capitalism
• "over-population."
• "illth."
• The Organization of Society
• Property Under Socialism By Graham Wallas, M.A., Oxford
• Industry Under Socialism By Annie Besant
• The Transition to Social Democracy
• Transition21 By G. Bernard Shaw
• The Outlook By Hubert Bland

"Over-population."

The introduction of the capitalistic system is a sign that the exploitation of the laborer toiling for a bare subsistence wage has become one of the chief arts of life among the holders of tenant rights. It also produces a delusive promise of endless employment which blinds the proletariat to those disastrous consequences of rapid multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator and peasant proprietor. But indeed the more you degrade the workers, robbing them of all artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, on the one pleasure and the one human tie left to them—the gratification of their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of "over-population."97 But your slaves are beyond caring for your cries: they breed like rabbits; and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness, and murder. In the midst of the riches which their labor piles up for you, their misery rises up too and stifles you. You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the town from them; you appoint special carriages on your railways and special seats in your churches and theaters for them; you set your life apart from theirs by every class barrier you can devise; and yet they swarm about you still: your face gets stamped with your habitual loathing and suspicion of them: your ears get so filled with the language of the vilest of them that you break into it when you lose your self-control: they poison your life as remorselessly as you have sacrificed theirs heartlessly. You begin to believe intensely in the devil. Then comes the terror of their revolting; the drilling and arming of bodies of them to keep down the rest; the prison, the hospital, paroxysms of frantic coercion, followed by paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the meantime, the population continues to increase!

[97.]Witness the anti-immigration sentiment now appearing in the United States.—Am. Ed.