Page:Carl Sandburg - You and Your Job (1910).pdf/12

12 distinguished advocate of poverty, the fat clung to him in heavy collops and round flanks.

One reason I'm a Socialist is because the Socialists were the first to fight to abolish child labor, and to-day the Socialist party is the only one that has dared to declare in its platform that it is unalterably opposed to child labor, and that it will do all in its power to remove all conditions that make it possible for human beings anywhere to be underfed and overworked.

This one man crushed by a falling wall in Oshkosh isn't a single lonely accident all by itself. The charity bureaus report that 50,000 such deaths occur each year, and in addition to these, 450,000 are injured and disabled. Ten per cent of these have to accept charity.

Our military soldiers we pension and honor. Our industrial soldiers we make into beggars. Choked and suffocated in mine explosions, mangled by flying projections of machinery, caught under car wheels, toppling headlong from scaffoldings, they are brave, useful men—heroes of the industrial army. Some have provided insurance, some have friends, some are able to work, though crippled, but ten pef cent are made beggars, and in desperation hold out their hands for charity and learn the shame of alms.

It is time for the standing army to sit down. Some of the millions of dollars used to maintain idle garrisons could be passed along to the crippled industrial heroes.

Fifty years ago tramps were scarce, so the silver-haired grandfathers tell us. An occasional Weary Willie would come along, and