ian will speak not
only of the dark ages of feudalism, but of the dark ages of capitalism.
And labor sincerely believes itself justified in this by the terrible
indictment it brings against capitalistic society. In the face of its
enormous wealth, capitalistic society forfeits its right to existence
when it permits widespread, bestial poverty. The philosophy of the
survival of the fittest does not soothe the class-conscious worker when
he learns through his class literature that among the Italian
pants-finishers of Chicago {9} the average weekly wage is $1.31, and the
average number of weeks employed in the year is 27.85. Likewise when he
reads: {10} "Every room in these reeking tenements houses a family or
two. In one room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife
just recovering from her confinement, and the children running about half
naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one
underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room.
Here live a widow and her six children, two of whom are ill with scarlet
fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters, from twenty-nine years of
age downward, live, eat, and sleep together." And likewise, when he
reads: {11} "When one man, fifty years old, who has worked all his life,
is compelled to beg a little money to bury his dead baby, and another
man, fifty years old, can give ten million dollars to enable his daughter
to live in luxury and bolster up a decaying foreign aristocracy, do you
see nothing amiss?"

And on the other hand, the class-conscious worker reads the statistics of
the wealthy classes, knows what their incomes are, and how they get them.
True, down all the past he has known his own material misery and the
material comfort of the dominant classes, and often has this knowledge
led him to intemperate acts and unwise rebellion. But today, and for the
first time, because both society and he have evolved, he is beginning to
see a possible way out. His ears are opening to the propaganda of
Socialism, the passionate gospel of the dispossessed. But it does not
inculcate a turning back. The way through is the way out, he
understands, and with this in mind he draws up the programme.

It is quite simple, this programme. Everything is moving in his
direction, toward the day when he will take charge. The trust? Ah, no.
Unlike the trembling middle-class man and the small capitalist, he sees
nothing at which to be frigh