previously tried to bear their share of the world's work, nor to any of the revenues of that occupation. Our institutions guarantee them no right to be men; they simply enforce a claim to a share of paupers' dole. True, only comparatively few men suffer in their purse from this condition. Neither did the Southern slaves as a rule endure physical privations in excess of those which they have borne since emancipation. As in the case between the American colonies and Great Britain, however, it is not the money cost but the manhood cost of submission that makes the relation oppressive. A quickened social consciousness is calling for reconsideration of this phase of our social order. Impeachment of our industrial organization is meanwhile not an attack upon men, but judgment of a system.
A civilization in which one man's access to a station above that of pauperism is in any degree dependent upon the arbitrary personal will of other men is, by so much, repugnant to the principle of the radical similarity of all men in title to the franchise of manhood. Dives and Lazarus are no more alike in craving food and drink when hungry and thirsty, than they are in the ambition of each to stand erect and be a man. In many cases the modern Lazarus knows better than Dives how to appraise the relative worth of material and spiritual goods. The keen sting of modern social contrasts is not in the fact that Dives may bathe in champagne while the men who sweat for his dividends can hardly bathe at all. The sting is in the fact that, from his secure financial position, the rich man, even though he be incapable of comprehending the refinements of a sensitive man's moral wants, may ride roughshod over the personal dignity of the unattached proletarian, who, with only plain living, may be capable of high thinking. The vulnerable point in our present society is not its permission of large wealth to some of its members, but its maintenance of institutions which, in the last analysis, make some men's opportunity to work for wealth under any conditions dependent upon the arbitrary will of other men.
In so far as agitators for social changes squint toward the
