Owen at Home
'Some people who have some money already get more in this way: they find some people who have no money and say to them: "Come and work for us." Then the people who have no money go and work for the people that have the money. The people who have the money pay the workers just enough wages to keep them alive whilst they are at work. Then, when the things that the working people have been making are finished, the workers are sent away, and as they still have no money, they are soon starving. In the meantime the people who had the money take all the things that the workers have made and sell them for a great deal more money than they gave to the workers for making them. That's another way the idlers have of getting lots of money without doing any useful work.'
'When I'm grown up into a man,' said Frankie, with a flushed face, 'I'm going to be one of the workers, and when we've made a lot of things I shall stand up and tell the others what to do. If any of the idlers come to take our things away they'll get something they won't like.'
In a state of suppressed excitement and scarcely conscious of what he was doing, the boy began gathering up the toys and throwing them violently one by one into the box.
'I'll teach 'em to come taking our things away,' he exclaimed, relapsing momentarily into his street style of speaking. 'First of all we'll all stand quietly on one side. Then when the idlers come in and start touching our things, we'll go up to 'em and say: "'Ere, watcher doin' of? Just you put it down, will yer?" and if they don't put it down at once it'll be the worse for 'em, I can tell you.'
All the toys being collected, Frankie picked up the box and placed it noisily in its accustomed corner of the room.
'I should think the workers will be jolly glad when they see me coming to tell them what to do, shouldn't you, Mum?'
'I don't know, dear; you see so many people have tried to tell them, but they won't listen, they don't want to hear. They think it's quite right that they should work very hard all their lives, and quite right that most of the things they help to make should be taken away from them by the people who do nothing. The workers think that their children are not as good as the children of the idlers, and they teach their children that as soon as ever they are old enough they must
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