Page:Carl Sandburg - You and Your Job (1910).pdf/7

Rh a wheel in the dusk of the jungle did his part while he sang, cheerfully, "Every Little Bit Helps." Our tools, our houses, our food and clothing, our very manners and customs and songs and arts, are all things that trace far back—far back into the hazy beginnings of history.

Cities and temples have fallen into decay and ruin. Where the rain washes on crumbled pillars, and sunbeams and shadows play about silent crevice and wall, once was the clamor and tumult of surging human life. The kings and chieftains are dead. The crowds that applauded them are under the grass roots. But many and many a lesson they learned, many and many a trick they found of using the forces of nature, many and many a habit and trait and custom they acquired, are ours—ours to-day.

We are born social creatures. We live as social creatures.

Do you see, Bill, how your interests and mine and everybody else's are all tangled up and woven in with each other? Do you see how society, all of us together, produced Rockefeller, Thaw, and the one-legged man on the corner selling lead pencils? What would the world be without people? Solitary confinement is the cruelest punishment you can give a man—the chances are he will go crazy and try to kill himself when enough hours have passed during which he has heard no human voice and known