Next to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the principal faults of English working-men is sexual licence.  But this, too, follows with relentless logic, with inevitable necessity out of the position of a class left to itself, with no means of making fitting use of its freedom.  The bourgeoisie has left the working-class only these two pleasures, while imposing upon it a multitude of labours and hardships, and the consequence is that the working-men, in order to get something from life, concentrate their whole energy upon these two enjoyments, carry them to excess, surrender to them in the most unbridled manner.  When people are placed under conditions which appeal to the brute only, what remains to them but to rebel or to succumb to utter brutality?  And when, moreover, the bourgeoisie does its full share in maintaining prostitution—­and how many of the 40,000 prostitutes who fill the streets of London every evening live upon the virtuous bourgeoisie!  How many of them owe it to the seduction of a bourgeois, that they must offer their bodies to the passers-by in order to live?—­surely it has least of all a right to reproach the workers with their sexual brutality.

The failings of the workers in general may be traced to an unbridled thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibility in fitting into the social order, to the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment to a remoter advantage.  But is that to be wondered at?  When a class can purchase few and only the most sensual pleasures by its wearying toil, must it not give itself over blindly and madly to those pleasures?  A class about whose education no one troubles himself, which is a playball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life—­what incentives has such a class to providence, to “respectability,” to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a remoter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives?  A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects—­who can demand that such a class respect this social order?  Verily that is asking much!  But the working-man cannot escape the present arrangement of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists it, the greatest injury falls upon himself.

Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker.  In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible.  The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions?