"
This and similar experiences showed us that when the organisation of
the trade unions was more complete, and the accumulated funds of several
years were devoted to this purpose, the bulk of the inhabitants of
London, and of other great cities, could be made to suffer a degree of
famine comparable with that of Paris when besieged by the German army in
1870.
Wallace's watchword throughout these social agitations was "Equality of
Opportunity for All," and the ideal method by which he hoped to achieve
this end was a system of industrial colonisation in our own country
whereby _all_ would have a fair, if not an absolutely equal, share in
the benefits arising from the production of their own labour, whether
physical or mental.[50]
With regard to the education of the people, especially as a
stepping-stone to moral and intellectual reform, Wallace believed in the
training of individual natural talent, rather than the present system of
general education thrust upon every boy or girl regardless of their
varying mental capacities. He also urged that the building-up of the
mind should be alternated with physical training in one or more useful
trades, so that there might be, not only at the outset, but also in
later life, a choice of occupation in order to avoid the excess of
unemployment in any one direction.
In his opinion, one of the injurious results of our competitive system,
having its roots, however, in the valuable "guilds" of a past epoch, was
the almost universal restriction of our workers to only one kind of
labour.
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