d now, how fares modern man? Consider the United States, the most
prosperous and most enlightened country of the world. In the United
States there are 10,000,000 people living in poverty. By poverty is
meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate
shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained.
In the United States there are 10,000,000 people who have not enough to
eat. In the United States, because they have not enough to eat, there
are 10,000,000 people who cannot keep the ordinary 1 measure of strength
in their bodies. This means that these 10,000,000 people are perishing,
are dying, body and soul, slowly, because they have not enough to eat.
All over this broad, prosperous, enlightened land, are men, women, and
children who are living miserably. In all the great cities, where they
are segregated in slum ghettos by hundreds of thousands and by millions,
their misery becomes beastliness. No caveman ever starved as chronically
as they starve, ever slept as vilely as they sleep, ever festered with
rottenness and disease as they fester, nor ever toiled as hard and for as
long hours as they toil.

In Chicago there is a woman who toiled sixty hours per week. She was a
garment worker. She sewed buttons on clothes. Among the Italian garment
workers of Chicago, the average weekly wage of the dressmakers is 90
cents, but they work every week in the year. The average weekly wage of
the pants finishers is $1.31, and the average number of weeks employed in
the year is 27.85. The average yearly earnings of the dressmakers is
$37; of the pants finishers, $42.41. Such wages means no childhood for
the children, beastliness of living, and starvation for all.

Unlike the caveman, modern man cannot get food and shelter whenever he
feels like working for it. Modern man has first to find the work, and in
this he is often unsuccessful. Then misery becomes acute. This acute
misery is chronicled daily in the newspapers. Let several of the
countless instances be cited.

In New York City lived a woman, Mary Mead. She had three children:
Mary, one year old; Johanna, two years old; Alice, four years old.
Her husband could find no work. They starved. They were evicted
from their shelter at 160 Steuben Street. Mary Mead strangled her
baby, Mary, one year old; strangled Alice, four years old; failed to
strangle Johanna, two years old, and then herself to