Page:Carl Sandburg - You and Your Job (1910).pdf/4

4 so he is. I'll agree with you, Bill, in calling him "a quitter," but right here is where I’m going to quit agreeing with you and argue some points. It's you and me to the mat now on a big proposition.

Who made this man a quitter? There's a question worth asking and worth trying to answer. In the first place, he had no choice about coming into this world, did he? His parents brought him into life on this planet without asking him whether he wanted to come or not. His birth was social, his life and history development have been social. And when I say "social," I mean that what he learned and did and became was the result mainly of contact with other people.

What you do yourself is individual. What you do by or with or for others is social. Get the distinction, Bill? Well, paste it in your hat and fasten it in your memory, But don't lose it. If I can get you to keep in mind this difference between what is social and what is individual, I'll hammer you into a Socialist.

Who makes the quitters, Bill? Society. Who and what is society? You and me and the man across the street and around the corner and the people uptown and downtown and out in the suburbs and on the farms, all of us together make up society. We elect the men who write the laws and pass the laws, we elect the men who are supposed to enforce the laws. And now you see that if the laws are such that they allow social conditions that produce quitters, then the society that elects men