ught to
refer only to the variations rather high above the starvation line,
even though the American must call starvation a standard which the
coolie may think tolerable and to which the European poor in the
Middle Ages were often accustomed. On the other hand, neither
capitalism nor socialism can protect the reckless and the wasteful
against economic suicide.

Much more important is the problem of suffering through the character
of the work itself. That is the real fountainhead of the socialistic
flood which threatens to inundate our present-day social structures.
But is there not even here a psychological misunderstanding involved?
It may be granted that many a man and many a woman stand in the
factory day after day and year after year with the one feeling of
distress and wretchedness at the hard work to which they are forced.
But is their work really responsible for it, and is it not rather
their personal attitude? Who is doing harder physical work than the
sportsman? There is no more exhausting muscle strain than the climb
over the glaciers of the Alps, which thousands pursue with passion.
Analyze the profession of the physician. How many of his functions are
in themselves of such a character that they might be denounced as the
most humiliating slavery, if they were demanded from any man who could
not see the aim and higher interest which they are serving! This is
exactly the point where the leaders of labour are sinning
unpardonably. They work with all the means of suggestion, until the
workman, as if hypnotized, looks on the mere movements which he is to
perform in the factory, and forgets entirely the higher interest and
aim of civilization which he is helping to serve. The scholar in his
laboratory has to do a thousand things which in themselves are ugly
and dirty, tiresome and dangerous, uninteresting and exhausting, but
which he is performing with enthusiasm because he knows that he is
serving the great ideal of cultured life, to discover the truth and
thus to help the progress of mankind. There is under no factory roof a
workman so forlorn that the work of his hands is not aiding the
fulfilment of an equally great and equally ideal purpose of civilized
mankind, the development of economic civilization. As soon as his
labour amidst the noise of the machines is felt as such a service to
an ideal cultural purpose, the work is no longer dead, but living,
interesting, significant, wonderful.

The mother who tak