ent.

"God bless me," she shouted angrily, "what right have I to ask the
creatures to go hungry? Am I to beat them when they cry? It's not
their fault that they want food, and it's not my poor man's fault that
they haven't any. He's ready to work at his trade if anybody wants him
to do so, and if he can't get work and if the children are hungry
whose fault is it?"

Mrs. Cafferty held that there was something wrong somewhere, but
whether the blame was to be allocated to the weather, the employer,
the government or the Deity, she did not know, nor did Mrs.
Makebelieve know; but they were agreed that there was an error
somewhere, a lack of adjustment with which they had nothing to do, but
the effects whereof were grievously visible in their privations.
Meantime it had become necessary that Mrs. Cafferty should adjust
herself to a changing environment. A rise or fall in wages is
automatically followed by a similar enlargement or shrinkage of one's
necessities, and the consequent difference is registered at all points
of one's life-contact. The physical and mental activities of a
well-to-do person can reach out to a horizon, while those of very poor
people are limited to their immediate, stagnant atmosphere, and so the
lives of a vast portion of society are liable to a ceaseless change, a
flux swinging from good to bad forever, an expansion and constriction
against which they have no safeguards and not even any warning. In
free nature this problem is paralleled by the shrinking and expansion
of the seasons; the summer with its wealth of food, the winter
following after with its famine, but many wild creatures are able to
make a thrifty provision against the bad time which they know comes as
certainly and periodically as the good time. Bees and squirrels and
many others fill their barns with the plentiful overplus of the summer
fields, birds can migrate and find sunshine and sustenance elsewhere,
and others again can store during their good season a life energy by
means whereof they may sleep healthily through their hard times. These
organizations can be adjusted to their environments because the
changes of the latter are known and can be more or less accurately
predicted from any point. But the human worker has no such regularity.
His food period does not ebb and recur with the seasons. There is no
periodicity in their changes and, therefore, no possibility for
defensive or protective action. His physical structure uses an