fetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his many mansions,
where light and air, the great purifiers, are already dimmed and
corrupted before they do him service. He is insecure in the labor by
which he lives. He works today, and tomorrow he may be told there is no
further need for him, and his fate and the fate of those dependent on
him are not remembered by those who dismissed him. If he dies, leaving
wife or children, the social order makes but the most inhuman provision
for them. How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State for its poor the
workhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn loving-kindness
into official acts and make legal and formal what should be natural
impulse and the overflow of the heart. So great a disparity exists
between spiritual theory and the realities of the social order that it
might almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all on our
civilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point where
we could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery. Here God possesses the
world."

The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, sees
him laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, on
strike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringing
children into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliest
years, a pauper when his days of strength are passed. He dies in
charitable institutions. Though his labors are necessary he is yet not
integrated into the national economy. He has no share of his own in the
wealth of the nation. He cannot claim work as a right from the holders
of economic power, and this absolute dependence upon the autocrats of
industry for a livelihood is the greatest evil of any, for it puts a
spiritual curse on him and makes him in effect a slave. Instinctively he
adopts a servile attitude to those who can sentence him and his children
to poverty and hunger without trial or judgment by his peers. A hasty
word, and he may be told to draw his pay and begone. The spiritual wrong
done him by the social order is greater than the material ill, and that
spiritual wrong is no less a wrong because generation after generation
of workers have grown up and are habituated to it, and do not realize
the oppression; because in childhood circumstance and the black art of
education alike conspire to make the worker humble in heart and to take
the crown and sceptre from his spirit, and his elders are already