A B C of modern socialism

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Yes, they both can, do, and will continue to do so. At this moment the total wages paid to the proletariat would not, even if equally divided among them, provide sufficient to keep them all in health.

Then how do the proletariat as a whole continue to live?

By the additions to their total wages of the gifts of charity.

What forms of charity?

The charitable supplements of the wages of the proletariat are (a) private and personal, as in tips, patronage, gifts, etc.; (6) semi-public, Christian, etc., by means of charitable organisations (of which there are a thousand in London alone); (c) State charity in the form of free schooling, feeding, pensions, workhouses, hospitals, industrial and health insurance.

What must be the end of this degradation of wages?

As charity supplements and supplants wages, the freedom of the workmen to spend on their own initiative will be more and more curtailed. Who pays the fiddler will call the tune; and, in the end, the proletariat will be no better than kept slaves.

But is this culmination inevitable?

Provided that the wage system remains, the servile state is inevitable.

Apart from reducing the proletariat to slavery, what other objects are there to the wage system?

There are moral, economic and practical objects as well to the wage system.