in our eyes—every one must see and feel this concerning himself.
I cannot but repeat this same thing again and again, notwithstanding the cold and hostile silence with which my words are received. A moral man, living a life of comfort, a man even of the middle class (I will not speak of the upper classes, who daily consume to satisfy their caprices the results of hundreds of working days), cannot live quietly, knowing that all that he is using is produced by the labour and crushed lives of working people, who are dying without hope—ignorant, drunken, dissolute, half-savage creatures employed in mines, factories, and at agricultural labour, producing the articles that he uses.
At the present moment I who am writing this and you who will read it, whoever you may be—both you and I have wholesome, sufficient, perhaps abundant and luxurious food, pure, warm air to breathe, winter and summer clothing, various recreations, and, most important of all, we have leisure by day and undisturbed repose at night. And here, by our side, live the working people, who have neither wholesome food, nor healthy lodgings, nor sufficient clothing, nor recreations, and who, above all, are deprived not only of leisure but even of rest: old men, children, women, worn out by labour, by sleepless nights, by disease, who spend their whole lives providing for us those articles of comfort and luxury which they do not possess, and which are for us not necessaries but superfluities. Therefore, a moral man, I do not say a Christian, but simply a man professing humane views or merely esteeming justice, cannot but wish to change his life and to cease to use articles of luxury produced under such conditions.
If a man really pities those who manufacture tobacco, then the first thing he will naturally do will be to cease smoking, because by continuing to buy and smoke tobacco he encourages the preparation of tobacco, by which men's health is destroyed. And so with every other article of luxury. If a man can still
