ines of production and distribution; and
this blighting malady cannot be cured by charity, but it will spread
until this system is supplanted by the just one of co-operative
industrialism, a system by which these necessities shall be produced
and distributed for the use of laborers, those who live by making and
operating the machines.

Every gift to charity by a rich man is a robbery of a poor man. You will
not see this at once, if ever, and I shall not blame you for the failure
to do so. It was not seen by me until I was much older than you; but I
am now seeing it as clearly as I ever saw the sun on a cloudless
noonday, and this is true of rapidly growing millions who are resolutely
resolved to do away with the prevailing conception of charity, according
to which capitalists may rob laborers of the fruit of their toil, giving
them of it barely enough to keep body and soul together and to raise up
children who are doomed to follow in their footsteps; and then, when the
strength of their victim fails, to make amends for the robberies, by
giving the most highly favored among them beds in hospitals, poor-houses
in which to die prematurely, and nameless graves in potter's fields in
which to await hopefully a resurrection and ascension to an inheritance
of happiness in a sky, which was denied them on the earth.

The time is at hand when everywhere the unemployed and the underpaid
shall begin a resistless march towards the goal of economic levelism
under a banner containing this slogan: We want no charity but the right
to work and the fruits of our labors that we and our helpless dependents
may have every necessity to the fullest life for body and soul.

During more than a whole generation Mrs. Brown and I have not produced a
spoonful of any food, a thread of any garment or a shingle of any house;
and yet we have had foods, garments and houses in abundance with some to
spare, while their producers have had them in scarcity with much to
want.

While the world war was on, an ill wind for the producers blew a
thousand dollars to us and an ill wind for us blew it into the hands of
a committee, ostensibly for investment on behalf of a hospital of which
we approved, but really for the purchase of a bond in the interest of a
war of which we disapproved.

The fathers of the present generation of producers and distributors of
the necessities of life were robbed in order that we might inherit the
property from which our income is