nd lift, much after the
manner of a machine, will have no further value in the field of human
labour.

Therefore, even today, we find that wherever that condition which we
call modern civilisation prevails, and in proportion as it tends to
prevail--wherever steam-power, electricity, or the forces of wind
and water, are compelled by man's intellectual activity to act as the
motor-powers in the accomplishment of human toil, wherever the delicate
adaptions of scientifically constructed machinery are taking the place
of the simple manipulation of the human hand--there has arisen, all the
world over, a large body of males who find that their ancient fields of
labour have slipped or are slipping from them, and who discover that
the modern world has no place or need for them. At the gates of
our dockyards, in our streets, and in our fields, are to be found
everywhere, in proportion as modern civilisation is really dominant,
men whose bulk and mere animal strength would have made them as warriors
invaluable members of any primitive community, and who would have been
valuable even in any simpler civilisation than our own, as machines
of toil; but who, owing to lack of intellectual or delicate manual
training, have now no form of labour to offer society which it stands
really in need of, and who therefore tend to form our Great Male
Unemployed--a body which finds the only powers it possesses so little
needed by its fellows that, in return for its intensest physical labour,
it hardly earns the poorest sustenance. The material conditions of life
have been rapidly modified, and the man has not been modified with them;
machinery has largely filled his place in his old field of labour, and
he has found no new one.

It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarian
standpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, and
who might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was the
dominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their
people, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the male
unemployed: "Give us labour or we die!" (The problem of the unemployed
male is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the unemployed
female. It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its
present form as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes
began to sever the agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him of
his ancient forms of social toil.