to the
father, and justice to the father is his full share of the good things
of life. As long as he has to pay tribute to a horde of non-producers,
who have merely invested in his endurance, so long will he be unable
to keep his child at school.

It is the daughters of the poor that become the victims of
middle-class lust--Fantine is the daughter of a working man. She is
multiplied by tens of thousands on the streets of great cities,
selling her soul for a morsel of bread. We are hardened to that and we
think we are meriting the approbation of angels when we start a rescue
mission for her special class.

How pure in the sight of God is poor Fantine when compared with the
cowards who will not smash the mill of which she is the mere grist.
Just so long as there is a cash consideration in her life must
capitalism bear the burden of her sin!

There were millions of men out of work last winter. The political
parties took no notice. The leaders knew the minds of the electors.
They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any
connection between government and work.

Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could
do to find employment.

"God knows!" was his reply.

Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are
reinforced, and the search for creature comforts recruits the ranks
of women who are not fallen, but knocked down. The supreme function of
the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one
another and hard to be out of joint.

Poverty is the mother curse of the ages. No man suffering from her
withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best. Socialism
tackles the master job of abolishing it. Not by any fantastic plan of
redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to
the social charges, pensioners and cripples an assurance of life
without the stigma of pauperism.

Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of
poverty. Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether
waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now
filling the air with machines that fly like birds. The inventions of
the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of
our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an
automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good
plays! They make all these things. They make them all possible for
o