Page:James Connolly - Socialism Made Easy (1909).djvu/9

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letter advocating the establishment in New York schools with city money of lunch kitchens, these to sell food at actual cost and to give needy children tickets just like those paid for, to the end that no child might know that his fellow was eating at the expense of the city by the color of his ticket. This is done in Paris.”

Contrast this solicitude for the self-respect of the poor children, recognized by Superintendent Maxwell in the plan of these “foreign Socialists” with the insulting methods of the capitalist “bread lines” and charitable organizations in general.

But all the same it is too horrible to take practical examples in relieving the distress caused by capitalist society from pestilent agitators who wish to destroy the society whose victims they are succoring, and mere foreigners, too. The capitalist method of parading mothers and children for a hour in the street before feeding them is more calculated to build up the proper degree of pride in the embryo American citizens; and make them appreciate the benefits their fathers and brothers are asked to vote for.

Read this telling how hungry children and mothers stood patiently waiting for a meal on the sidewalk, and whoop it up for pure ecstasy of joy that you are permitted to live in a system of society wherein a great metropolitan daily thought that the fact of five hundred children getting a “hearty luncheon” was remarkable enough to deserve a paragraph: “Five hundred ill-feed children who attend the schools on the lower east side got a hearty luncheon yesterday when the first of the children's lunchrooms was opened at Canal and Forsyth