ABSTRACT
There were many writers on political economy within the early Labour Party who were, like Oscar Wilde, concerned with the ‘soul of man under socialism’. But while, in consequence, they portentously observed that man did not live by bread alone, they rarely neglected the material. Or, to be more specific, they accepted that if Labour was to deliver a New Jerusalem then its green and pleasant land had to provide the basis for that comfortable standard of living which was denied to the working class under capitalism.
