Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/45

Rh duties. Modern industry is run at a terrific speed which leads inevitably to a shortened working life, or decreased efficiency. The speeding-up system clearly places a premium on youth and vigor and a serious handicap on age. This fact the companies are not slow to recognize. They do not want old men on their pay-rolls—and they say so, clearly and emphatically. There are many industries in which men are expected to go to pieces before reaching normal old age. The pace is set high, and those who cannot keep it, must drop out or take less lucrative positions.

Industry offers the workingman an opportunity to earn a living, subject to the caprice of overwork, sickness, accidents, new machinery, individual shut-downs and general suspensions of industrial activity—a hierarchy of forces which overshadow every movement of his life, threatening continually to hurl him into an abyss of hardship and misery. Any one, or any combination of these five forces, may, at any time, diminish, temporarily or permanently, the income-earning capacity of the worker. All of them are beyond his individual control, yet they strike, with mericlessmerciless [sic] certainty, the sources of livelihood of the family in which they occur.

The nation is built on the work of its workers.

Today, as in every past age, the idler and the parasite are burdens on national life. They add nothing to national well-being, while they cost their keep.

The workers are the nation. As they thrive, the nation thrives. As they succeed in life, the nation is prosperous and great. The future of the nation is inseparable from the future of the nation's workers. It was not for nothing that Capt. John Smith insisted,—"He who will not work, neither shall he eat."

Fronted by these facts, we are deliberately working out an economic system which glorifies ownership and penalizes work. The owner prospers; the worker exists. The owner lives upon the fat of the land, which the worker has created.