xed cotton and shoddy of earlier days. Our import duties,
which do, indeed, try to spare his dinner-pail, should be made to spare
his wardrobe and the modest comforts of his life.

Commercial crises still occur and are followed by hard times; and while
a really wise reform of money and banking would not wholly prevent
them, it would greatly mitigate their severity.[1]

[1] This was written before the recent reforms of import duties
and of the banking system had been enacted.

Emergency employment is desperately needed when hard times come.
European Governments excel our own in providing it, but it is entirely
possible to adopt their methods and improve on them.

Our natural resources have been wasted in a prodigal way. Forests have
been recklessly cut, fires been invited and the soil itself has been
sacrificed. Natural gas and oil have been burned with no regard for the
future. Coal and other minerals have not been husbanded. It should be
possible for us to cease to play the spendthrift with the patrimony
that nature has given to us.

We have the beginnings of a parcel post, but we need a more highly
developed one that will come nearer to the standards maintained in
other countries. With it we need telephone and telegraph systems that
can be universally used.

In our larger cities, we are struggling to get rapid transit and shall
have to continue the struggle; but we ought to have, with urban
railroads, subways, and the like, measures that would reduce the amount
of traveling that has to be done between homes and places of labor. A
free use of the principle of "eminent domain" would make it possible to
acquire land for carrying out any policy of general beneficence, and
that, too, without robbing the owners of it. By resorting to this
measure much of the manufacturing which exposes great cities to
imminent danger of conflagration might and should be moved bodily to
outlying districts.

Of all industrial abuses of the past the cruelest has been the crushing
of the life of young children by hard and prolonged labor. We are
making headway in removing this evil, but much still remains to be
gained; and a vast amount is to be gained by a comprehensive policy for
improving the status of working-women.

Social justice demands some effective means of getting legal justice.
We have courts, certainly. Do they give the service that we need and,
in particular, do they give it to the poor? We do not here impugn