Page:May Walden - Socialism and the Home (1900).pdf/16

 16 bread in a day. One man and two boys can spin as much cotton as a thousand spinners used to do. Examples might be multiplied by the hundreds, but you all understand that with men and women being constantly thrown out of employment by new inventions few can take the responsibility of a family upon themselves.

Besides the uncertainty of work caused by new inventions, wages are lowered by these same machines which should make our living easier. For example, a machine for making tin cans has been invented which a child can run. He feeds the machine at one end with sheets of tin; at the other end sixty-four cans drop out every minute. No manufacturer will pay a man regular wages for doing what a child can and will do for a much less amount. So wages drop to the level of a child's subsistence. Can you not see that it is impossible to make a home under such circumstances, or to keep one on such wages? The men, married or unmarried, must look elsewhere for work. They go to the Klondike, to the huge wheat farms, or any other place where the slightest chance offers. Wages are not enough to support a family, so the idea of marriage is given up and in many cases the family is abandoned. The man who has been the support of the family must go. The home is broken up.

The remedy which capitalism would apply to the man who thus deserts his family is to arrest him for "vagrancy" and put him in jail! Think of doing that to a man who tramps miles a day and begs for work at every place he passes! If you glance over the daily papers you will scarcely fail to find from one to three records of suicide with the words "despondent from lack of work," or "anxiety" given as the cause. Volumes of misery are bound up in those few words, yet we pay little attention to them, or refuse to read them because they are frequent and make us