y slum,
and never know what it is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling
of security or rest--

We are weary in our cradles
From our mother's toil untold;
We are born to hoarded weariness
As some to hoarded gold.

The system of competitive commercialism, of large-scale capitalist
industry in its final flowering! I quote from "The Jungle":

Here in this city tonight, ten thousand women are shut up in
foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to
live. Tonight in Chicago there are ten thousand men,
homeless and wretched, willing to work and begging for a
chance, yet starving, and fronting with terror the awful
winter cold! Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand
children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives
in the effort to earn their bread! There are a hundred
thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor,
struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones! There
are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless,
waiting for death to take them from their torments! There
are a million people, men and women and children, who share
the curse of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can
stand and see, for just enough to keep them alive; who are
condemned till the end of their days to monotony and
weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to dirt
and disease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice! And then
turn over the page with me, and gaze upon the other side of
the picture. There are a thousand--ten thousand, maybe--who
are the masters of these slaves, who own their toil. They do
nothing to earn what they receive, they do not even have to
ask for it--it comes to them of itself, their only care is
to dispose of it. They live in palaces, they riot in luxury
and extravagance--such as no words can describe, as makes
the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick
and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of
shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for
horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets,
for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies.
Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in
ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful
and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the
lives o