2
THE WAY OF SALVATION.
social and commercial creeds it is a question of the survival of the strongest, of pushing the weakest to the wall and climbing over their shoulders; it is a question of taking advantages, of the powerful binding the hands of those less strong. We befool ourselves with another smooth and easy lie when we are resigned to the operation of the law of the survival of the fittest. In present social conditions it is the law of the survival of the shrewdest and the strongest, of the most unfeeling and the least conscientious. And with every step upward that such a one takes there are legal and commercial privileges that, like a lever, send him two steps higher by pressing down so much the harder on those below him.
Proof that our so-called civilization is all a sham and a shameful lie, a marble sepulchre, rich and beautiful and magnificent on the outside, but full within of noisome death and the poisonous breath of destruction, is to be found not only in the slums and dives and alleyways of those plague-centers, the great cities. It is everywhere. The farmer on those glorious Western prairies, the farmer's wife and the farmer's children find life one unceasing struggle and grind, which gets them a bare subsistence. The factory operative of New England is paid a starvation pittance, told it is all his labor is worth, and then because his employers know he can't live on it is given a bonus, ostensibly to make life easier, really to pauperize him. The miner and the day laborer toil and slave harder and more hours in the day than it is right for any human being to work and get—what? The poorest of food and the coarsest of clothing, barely enough to satisfy their hunger and keep them warm. The mechanic, the operative, the day laborer, with growing families often find it impossible with their last endeavor to earn enough to support those families and are forced to put their children at work. The State comes in with a compulsory education law, saying "my citizens must be intelligent." But the weak hands of those little children were the last necessity for the support of
the family. They are taken from the factory,the shop or the store and put into school. Then the whole family is broken up and goes perhaps to the poor-house.
We are accustomed to say that the hope of a republic lies only in the education and intelligence of its masses. We think we have solved that problem. But it will not be many years until we shall find that another problem, the problem of a widespread poverty, has rubbed it all out. General prosperity is a condition precedent to general intelligence. In a few years we are going to be given an alternative between allowing the children of our working people to grow up in ignorance, with all the manhood and womanhood worked down and ground out of them, or adding to free schools and free text-books free dinners, free shoes and stockings, and pay for the time the children take from their work to attend school. Every year, with a larger and larger number, this is getting to be a struggle of education versus bread and butter. And as long as those who are snobbishly called "the laboring classes" keep up their vulgar habit of eating, the bread and butter will come out first best.
It is growing plainer every day that we are going straight in the direction of those old-world, shameful conditions which the United States was created to disprove. Our system of civilization is essentially the same as that across the water. A little larger and freer and more flexible, it is true, but it hardens and thickens and contracts as our numbers increase, and already is beginning to bear the same poisonous fruit. It will not be long until we shall have just as many things that need blowing up as there are in Russia or Austria, and inasmuch as we have ten times the dynamite in our national character it will be a precious row which this country will have a generation or so hence. It is of no use trying to patch up the old affair by putting on plasters of freer and more education and systematized charity. Professor Adler may build model tenement houses from now until doomsday, and as long as the present system continues the