Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/24

 22 labor-saving machinery throws thousands of workers out of employment from time to time. No one knows whose turn it is next. Neither the most skilful mechanic nor the almost exclusive brainworker is out of reach of the competition of the machine. The division of labor and technical and modern methods make it ever possible to substitute cheap labor for dear labor.

Moreover, the tremendous magnitude and increased speed of modern production and transportation and the perpetual attempt on the part of the capitalists to increase their profits by neglecting to install costly safety appliances and proper means of precaution make modern production ever more precarious. The industrial field is a battlefield strewn with the corpses of the working class. He who leaves for work in the morning can never be sure that he will not return a cripple, or even that he will return alive, at all. The poet sings of man's inhumanity to man in past ages of brutality. Wars have always been destructive. The healthy, able-bodied men have been killed off and women have been left widows and children orphans. At such times the women have often had to buckle down to hard work and drudgery. There is less of that sort of warfare to-day, but the industrial battle is far more destructive. More people perish annually upon it than were killed in the world's greatest battles. Just at this writing (December, 1907), the civilized world should experience a thrill of horror, if the commonness of such things had not long ago worn off the effect at several most dreadful mine disasters. Does the civilized world of our "democratic government" ever give a thought as to what becomes of, what suffering has to be gone through by the widows and orphans of the miners whose charred bodies are now being excavated from several mines?

Society is becoming more and more reckless as to its expenditure of human life. Everybody, therefore, is anxious "to look out. for a rainy day" and it is sure to "rain" sometime, but the worst is that it generally "rains" long before the workers have had chance to prepare for it. Herein lies