He is insecure in the
labor by which he lives. He works today, and tomorrow he may be told
there is no further need for him, and his fate and the fate of those
dependent on him are not remembered by those who dismissed him. If he
dies, leaving wife or children, the social order makes but the most
inhuman provision for them. How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State
for its poor the workhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn
loving-kindness into official acts and make legal and formal what should
be natural impulse and the overflow of the heart. So great a disparity
exists between spiritual theory and the realities of the social order
that it might almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all
on our civilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point
where we could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery. Here God possesses
the world."
The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, sees him
laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, on
strike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringing
children into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliest
years, a pauper when his days of strength are passed.
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