Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/463



HE manual worker is not left in ignorance respecting his rights, his wrongs and his importance. In season and out of season he is taught that the world owes every man a living and that he should receive wages enough to support his family according to the American standard; that his labor makes value and that his share of the profits is withheld; that capital, all-powerful, is consumed with passion to enslave helpless labor; that he can secure his rights only by compulsion, since the interests of capital are antagonistic to those of labor. These matters deserve consideration.

The world, that is, the community, owes no man a living; it did not bring any man into existence and it is under no obligation to support the children of heedless parents. One must emphasize this truism, because there is a rapidly growing tendency to believe that poverty and vice are due to the rapacity of employers and to insist on the responsibility of the community, en masse, for continuance of the evil conditions. During a so-called investigation by a commission of the Illinois Senate, an official of the Illinois Steel Company was asked to tell what he regarded as a fair living wage for a man with a wife and daughter. At a hearing before a Massachusetts commission it was shown that the wages paid are so small that one employee, in order to support himself, his wife and their eight children, was compelled to do outside work—and the heartless corporation was duly flayed in headlines. But it must be evident to any thoughtful man that wife and children can not be considered in connection with the relations of wage-earner and wage-payer. The only question concerns the worth of the man's services. Introduction of other matters would so increase the uncertainty of business affairs as to make them little better than a lottery. If a man's services are not worth enough to secure wages which would support a family, he should not marry. He may not complain because the community is unwilling to have him gratify his desires at its expense.

The wage in shops and factories is said to be so small that women are driven to prostitution; one is told that, in each year, 200,000 women in our land are compelled to sell their bodies to procure the necessaries of life, and that each year sees 700,000 children perish because their parents have insufficient nourishment. But the voices, which rise in bitter outcry against this awful condition, do not rise in protest against encouragement of unrestricted reproduction among the wretched or against the wide open door which increases the population annually by