Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/34

 32 female sex furnishes the tremendous army of professional prostitutes, and there are those in lace, silk and diamonds as well as in rags and tatters. Thieves, frauds, confidence men, horse racers, professional gamblers, and every other kind of fraud and "sport" are recruited from both sexes alike.

These are society's offscourings. It is a large class that may have to be reckoned with in time of social disturbances. They always swing to the side of the rich, from whose crumbs they live. In Russia to-day they are furnishing the reaction's "Black Hundred," the scourge of the revolutionary movement and the dread of the working class. They furnish no field for Socialist propaganda. They are themselves beyond redress and have no future generation for which to hope and work.

Even among the workers proper, those that remain within the realms of usefulness, there are downward tendencies. The intense and brainstunning work in the factory degrades the worker to a mere drudge. There remains no interest or incentive beyond work, eat and sleep. The men often drown their misery in drink. Who can blame them when one is really fair about it! Sometimes the women do the same, but then they are dangerously near the brink of the slums. Oftener they become crabid, stupified, reckless of personal appearances, narrow and peevish. The moral atmosphere in the factory is so polluted that both in word and deed the girls often hover on the brink of slum life. The thing that Roosevelt has designated as race-suicide has a most deteriorating influence on the womanly virtues of the women of to-day. Innocence, love, and virtue fall before it. Kindness, sympathy and motherly love are blunted. But it is on the increase, and the most strenuous presidential exertion cannot stop it. It is born in capitalist society from the uncertainty of a livelihood and the corresponding decline of healthy, happy, prosperous family life.

But the entire picture of modern society is not dark. It has some very bright spots indeed. There be those, mostly of the intellectual class or those that live by taking advantage