Again, a bad education system, which results in producing only 50,000 children who can read and write fluently out of 3,000,000 children who are, or who ought to be at school—(these figures are taken from last year's report of the Committee of Council)—is a fertile cause of bad circumstances, and represents a patent process for manufacturing paupers. It is political power in the hands of a few which has so long preserved this bad education system. I might add "Indirect Taxation," which takes one-tenth of a working man's income[1], and one hundredth of a rich man's income^; this goes to aggravate the depressing circumstances which surround the labouring class.
Believe me, you are deceived by interested politicians or by superficial thinkers when you are told that political power cannot benefit your condition.
I am one of those who believe there is such a thing as the State: I should be amused if I were not saddened by observing the ingenious efforts which are made—^now that there is a distant prospect of the State becoming a popular power—on the part of certain Economists to prove that there is no such thing as the State at all^ that it is entirely a fiction, that it never did any harm—not even when Louis XIV. appropriated executive power, declaring "I am the State," and while he exulted in the glory of wars, whose perils he never shared, and revelled in luxury, left his famished peasantry by hundreds of thousands to satisfy their hunger on the bark of trees—and that there is nothing to be obtained from it. The State hitherto has been a terrible entity. Has not the English State—in other words the English executive power—committed great crimes? Has it not in olden times burnt and gibbeted patriots by the hundred, ay! by the thousand, whose only fault was that they loved their fellow men too well to remain silent under oppression? Has it not within the Century waged iniquitous wars for which our forefathers bled and for which we pay? Does not poor Hodge, who now shivers under the hedge, pay[2] for the war waged by Pitt and the English aristocracy to suppress French democratic institutions? Has it not and does it not now imprison men at home within crushing adverse artificial circumstances? But says M. Bastiat and his school of Economists, "it can
