Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/190

184 industry is least, their tenure of employment is most easily imperilledimperiled [sic]. The past two winters with armies of unemployed in every large city, recruited largely, we are told by competent observers, from the unskilled, bear witness to this fact.

A consequence of economic insecurity is a weakening of moral tone and grip; this is the greatest of all dangers to society. "Every great industrial crisis leaves behind it," says Dr. Warner, "a legacy of individual degeneracy and personal unthrift." "Involuntary idleness intensifies and perpetuates incapacity." Nothing so begets failure as the consciousness of failure. The discipline of regular and continuous occupation is a support which few can do without. At the recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws held that pauperism arises mainly from the casual worker class, that is, in the main, the unskilled class whose security of employment is slightest and whose mental attitude is therefore least hopeful and healthy. To live on the edge of social existence blinds the eyes to the social order which is not near the edge. Hopefulness of mind is a social force impossible to measure. It is hope which marks the difference between slavery and freedom, between stagnation and progress. But insecurity weakens and destroys hope, and if employment continues to be insecure, the result must be an increasing body of hopeless men and women, feeding, inevitably, the ranks of criminal and pauper degeneracy.

Viewed from this point, the significance of unskill becomes tremendous. Lack of skill stands as the bar to mental progress even in an unskilled age; but in an age demanding skill, the lack of it is itself a condition leading to degeneration. Through unskill, labor is condemned to low wages, a narrow outlook, an inability to meet the modern demands of industry; by remaining economically unfit, men become socially unfit and are forced for themselves and their children into the ceaseless round of struggle for bare subsistence, with consequent hopelessness, bodily decay and resultant misery. It should be clear that in refusing to meet the industrial needs of our age for skilled workers the nation is condemning a considerable part of its population to an inevitable economic unfitness and resultant mental sterility, since economic well-being is essential to mental stability and progress. Degeneracy, thus, is born of the unskilled hand and the untrained mind.

There is one further position which needs to be considered. It is becoming clear, as investigation into social life proceeds, that human progress depends largely upon society's creative minds, its "inventors," its originators, whose fertile ideas are passed on to the mind of the mass of mankind. It is these suggestive and fruitful ideas which mark the stages of advancement and which constitute the essence of civilization.