Extracts from _The Soul of Man Under Socialism_ 

by Oscar Wilde (1891).  


The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be
regretted.  We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity.  
Some of them are, no doubt, but the best among them are never grateful. 
They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are 
quite right to be so.  Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode 
of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some 
impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalists to tyrannize
over their private lives.  Why should they be grateful for the
crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated
at the board and are beginning to know it.  As for being discontented, 
a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings, and such a 
low mode of life, would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of 
anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue.  It is through 
disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through 
rebellion.  Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty.  But to 
recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.  It is like
advising a man who is starving to eat less.  For a town and country
laborer to practice thrift would be absolutely immoral.  Man should
not be ready to show that he can live like a badly fed animal.  He
should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on
the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. 
As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to
take than to beg.  No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented 
and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much to him. 
He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity 
them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.  They have made private
terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.  They 
must be extraordinarily stupid.  I can quite understand a man accepting
laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation,
as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realize
some form of beautiful and intellectual life.  But it is almost
incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by
such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance. 

However, the explanation is not really difficult to find.  It is
simply this.  Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and
exercise such a paralyzing effect over the nature of men, that no
class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.  They have to
be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve
them.  What is said by great employers of labor against agitators
is unquestionably true.  Agitators are a set of interfering,
meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of
the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them.  That
is the reason why agitators are so abundantly necessary.  Without
them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards
civilization.  Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence
of any action on the part of the slaves, or even expressed desire on
their own part that they should be free.  It was put down entirely
through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston 
and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves,
nor had anything to do with the question really.  It was, undoubtedly,
the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing.
And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received,
not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and
when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found
themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve,
many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things.  To the thinker, 
the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that 
Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant 
of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.

