Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/126

 The doctor, who had been bending over Mrs. Hooven, rose.

"It's no use," he said; "she has been dead some time—exhaustion from starvation."

The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.

Progress and Poverty

(One of the most widely-read treatises upon economics ever published, this book was the fountain head of the single-tax movement. The writer was a California journalist, 1839-1897, who devoted all his life to the propaganda of economic justice)

Unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last becoming evident that the enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil. It simply widens the gulf between Dives and Lazarus, and makes the struggle for existence more intense. The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work; wherever the new forces are anything like fully