There is the increasing tension required in the conduct of business which so saps a man's energies as to leave him little of either time or inclinati… - Keir Hardie

Thanks to the wise legislators of the past who had allowed our native land to go out of cultivation and left us dependent upon other countries for our food supplies, all that an invading force would be required to do would be to stop our food supplies coming in; the gaunt enemy of hunger would do all the invader's work.

History is one long record of like illustrations. Must our modern civilisation with all its teeming wonders come to a like end? We are reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days—Imperialism, taking tribute from conquered races, the accumulation of great fortunes, the development of a population which owns no property, and is always in poverty. Land has gone out of cultivation and physical deterioration is an alarming fact. An so we Socialists say the system which is producing these results must not be allowed to continue. A system which has robbed religion of its saviour, destroyed handicraft, which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on the streetsm and upright men into mean-spirited time-servers, cannot continue. In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow. Socialism with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. It has claimed its martyrs in the past, is claiming them now, will claim them still; but what then? Better to "rebel and die in the twenty worlds sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life."

During the contest I shall be a good deal in other constituencies where Labour men are being opposed. Both parties fear the presence in Parliament of Labour men whom they can can neither silence nor control. I want to see the number of such men increased, so that political hypocrites to the Churchill type may be unmasked and the health, comfort, safety, and general well-being of the working class promoted. I know you will hold the fort for Labour in my absence.