Page:Carl Sandburg - You and Your Job (1910).pdf/11

Rh was told of a laborer who while at work was crushed to death by a falling wall. The oldest of his nine children is fourteen. There was no insurance—a man who gets $1.50 a day and has a wife and nine children takes food from living babies who are hungry if he pays life insurance premiums. Now, Bill, I'm not absolutely certain, but if I were a betting man, I would bet you a thousand to one that some of those nine children will be quitters. Of course, Senator Dolliver, Andrew Carnegie, and preachers and editors tell us that poverty is an advantage. They say a man has to have obstacles to overcome in order to develop. With this proposition I agree. I think it is true that the muscles we exercise are the ones that grow, the faculties we use are the ones that develop, and the man who has never wrestled with problems and difficulties has never known the joy of living. But over and along with this I place. the proposition that a man will grow and develop in body and brain only when employed at work that gives him some high degree of pleasure. I believe in "obstacles," but I say that a system such as the capitalist system, putting such obstacles as starvation, underfeeding, overwork, bad housing, and perpetual uncertainty of work in the lives of human beings, is a pitiless, ignorant, blind, reckless, cruel mockery of a system.

Senator Dolliver says poverty is an advantage. He may have believed in underfeeding when he was a boy, but when I last saw the