On the Worth of Man

From Economic, one of George Bernard Shaw's Fabian Essays (1889)

"It was the increase of population that spread cultivation and civilization from the center to the snow line, and at last forced men to sell themselves to the lords of the soil: it is the same "force that continues to multiply men so that their exchange value fails slowly and surely until it disappears altogether - until even black chattel slaves are released as not worth keeping in a land where men of all colors are to be had for nothing. This is the condition of our English laborers today: they are no longer even dirt cheap; they are valueless, and can be had for nothing.

...

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 labour 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."


Ah, How the Elite love their underclass.