tates_, pages 69-108.

BRYCE: _The American Commonwealth_ (abridged edition), pages
417-427.

SHAW: _Municipal Government in Continental Europe_, pages 1-145.

ZUEBLIN: _American Municipal Progress_ (revised edition), pages
376-394.

CHAPTER XXXV

DIFFICULTIES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WORK

278. =The Fact of Misery.=--A brief study of the conditions in which a
city's toilers live and work and play makes it plain that the people
have to contend with numerous difficulties. Large numbers of them are
in misery, and there are few who are not living in constant fear of
it. To a foreigner who did not understand America, it would seem
incredible that misery should be prevalent in the midst of wealth and
unbounded natural resources, when mines and factories are making
record-breaking outputs, when harbors are thronged with ships and the
call for workers goes across the sea. But no one who visits the
tenements and alleys of the city fails to find abundant evidence of
misery and want. People do not live in dark rooms and dirty
surroundings from choice, sometimes as many as two thousand in a
single block. They do not willingly pay a large percentage of their
earnings in rent for a tenement that breeds fever and tuberculosis.
They do not feed their babies on impure milk and permit their children
to forage among the garbage cans because they care nothing for their
young. They do not shiver without heat or lose vitality for lack of
food until they have struggled for a comfortable existence to the
point of exhaustion. Misery is here as it is in the Old World cities,
and it leads to weakness and disease, drunkenness, vice, and crime.

279. =Easy Explanations.=--It is impossible to unravel completely the
skein of difficulties in which the people are enmeshed, or to simplify
the causes of the tangle. It is easy to blame a person's wretchedness
on his individual misconduct and incompetency, to say, for example,
that a man's family is sick and poor because he is intemperate. There
might be truth in the charge, but it would probably not be the whole
truth. It is easy to go back of the circumstance to the weak will of
the man that made him a prey to impulse and appetite and kept him
primitive in his habits, but that alone would not explain conditions.
It is easy to charge misery upon the ignorance of the woman in the
home who is wasteful of food and does not know how to provide for her
family, or to charge lack of