not as yet overcrowded. The rightful order of society is not
as yet submerged on our shores. There are the rewards of
merit for all who will work and wait. No man of average
intelligence needs to suffer in our country if he has clear
grit in him. "The stone that is fit for the wall," as the
Spanish proverb runs, "will not be left in the road."

II

FAULTS OF CAPITAL

But--for there is a very large "but" in the case--when all
this is said, only the thorough going _doctrinaire_ will
fail to see that merely half the case has been presented.
There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of
prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on
labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society
against it because of these patent faults, and closes the
hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the
Gradgrinds--"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."

Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults.
These faults spring largely out of the defective social
conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed.
Before we proceed to administer to him the whole measure of
the "whopping" due for his low estate, we had better look
back of him, to see why it is that he is as he is.

The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the
individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him
before he started on his career. His parents were probably
as inefficient as he is--and most likely _their_ parents
also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases
to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the
parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the
Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute at Boston lately,
said:

"There is great virtue in the inherited industrial
aptitudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make
a first-class dyer or a first-class machinist in one
generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack
horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made."

Our incompetents may plead that they were not born
competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to
do about this working of heredity against labor, except as
by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low