ritten in the spring of 1915.

"There is an old test for insanity which is made as follows: the suspect
is given a cup, and is told to empty a bucket into which water is
running from a faucet. If the suspect turns off the water before he
begins to bail out the bucket, he is sane. Nearly all the current
solutions of unemployment leave the faucet running. . . .

"The heart of the problem, the cause, one might well say, of
unemployment, is that the employment of men regularly or irregularly is
at no time an important consideration of those minds which control
industry. Social organization has ordered it that these minds shall be
interested only in achieving a reasonable profit in the manufacture and
the sale of goods. Society has never demanded that industries be run
even in part to give men employment. Rewards are not held out for such a
policy, and therefore it is unreasonable to expect such a performance.
Though a favorite popular belief is that we must 'work to live,' we
have no current adage of a 'right to work.' This winter there are
shoeless men and women, closed shoe-factories, and destitute shoemakers;
children in New England with no woolen clothing, half-time woolen mills,
and unemployed spinners and weavers. Why? Simply because the mills
cannot turn out the reasonable business profit; and since that is the
only promise that can galvanize them into activity, they stand idle, no
matter how much humanity finds of misery and death in this decision.
This statement is not a peroration to a declaration for Socialism. It
seems a fair rendering of the matter-of-fact logic of the analysis.

"It seems hopeless, and also unfair, to expect out-of-work insurance,
employment bureaus, or philanthropy, to counteract the controlling force
of profit-seeking. There is every reason to believe that profit-seeking
has been a tremendous stimulus to economic activity in the past. It is
doubtful if the present great accumulation of capital would have come
into existence without it. But to-day it seems as it were to be caught
up by its own social consequences. It is hard to escape from the
insistence of a situation in which the money a workman makes in a year
fails to cover the upkeep of his family; and this impairment of the
father's income through unemployment has largely to be met by child-and
woman-labor. The Federal Immigration Commission's report shows that in
not a single great American industry can the average yearly income of
t