Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/42

 30 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY



process must be great enough to maintain the complicated activi- ties upon which these enlarged satisfactions depend. Accepting 5 per cent, of the population of the United States as a liberal estimate of the class which we call the unemployed, it might be possible to make a plausible argument to the effect that these 5 per cent, of our population have no claim to an equity in the social process. 5 " There is no use for them. They ought not to have been born. No theory of life can find a rightful place for such a social surplus."

Without attempting to construct a brief for the benefit of this 5 per cent., the only reply necessary seems to me to be that this is really a negligible quantity. The life-process, as we under- stand it, requires, at any rate, the other 95 per cent. In order that any of us may get on in the higher developments of our interests, whether the essential material interests, or the derived spiritual interests, all this mass of people is necessary. The requisite division of labor and variety of situation is not other- wise possible. There must be so many hundred farmers and artisans in order that there may be one scholar and artist and moral leader. And there must be so many more farmers and artisans in order that scholarship and art and moral leadership may ascend to higher planes. The social process is not carried on by the few only who may be called the pinnacles of society. It is carried on by all who maintain the conditions upon which the pinnacles rest. It may be that too many people are born in a given part of the world, and that diminution of the birth- rate becomes to that extent a part of the social problem. It is conceivable that the 5 per cent, which we have just con- ceded, for the sake of argument, may represent an excessive accession-rate in the United States. But, on the other hand, it may also be that organization of life in accordance with the best that we know would absorb that 5 per cent, and create a demand for more sharers in the social process. It may be that the exist- ence of the 5 per cent, is an index of abnormality in our social

number of employable out of work. The force of the argument does not depend on the accuracy of the guess.
 * This is merely a guess at the number of unemployable plus the average