Your part in poverty

"Your part in poverty" by George Lansbury is a social and political tract written in the early 20th century. It explains Christian Socialism to churchgoers and argues that poverty and exploitation are human-made systems sustained by class privilege, profiteering, and competitive capitalism. The work urges Christians and workers to unite in love-based cooperation to remake industry and society on just, egalitarian lines.

The opening of the book sets its purpose and wartime context: an author’s note explains it was written to help Christians understand Socialism and to argue that only a change of heart, allied to social action, can redeem society; a preface by the Bishop of Winchester invites the Church to listen even where it disagrees. The introduction claims that a salvation focused only on the next world has failed, that wartime “unity” masks ongoing class divisions, and that real reform demands love, co-operation, and tackling root causes rather than handing out charity. Chapter I portrays a workman’s life of early labour, fixed low wages, insecurity through sickness and unemployment, meagre holidays, and stark inequality beside salaried and elite classes; it condemns labour’s treatment as a commodity, notes the displacement by machines, and calls for worker solidarity and nonviolent collective action. Chapter II contrasts public kindness to wounded soldiers with neglect of mothers and children, describing overcrowded housing, lack of baths, high rents, infant deaths, delayed clean-milk reform, child labour, and unequal education; it urges a cross‑class mothers’ movement, values motherhood and home-making, demands equal pay, and attacks the double standard and the economic roots of prostitution. Chapter III begins a critique of business culture—advertising deceits, monopolies (especially land), slum housing, the drink trade, and wartime profiteering—arguing that philanthropy cannot offset a profit system that severs wealth from service and multiplies wasteful competition.