Olympian
heights are inaccessible--the Titans of fact can never scale them to
storm its ancient reign.

THE RIGHT TO WORK

ALL kinds of relief, charitable or other, doubtless tend to perpetuation
of pauperism, inasmuch as paupers are thereby kept alive; and living
paupers unquestionably propagate their unthrifty kind more abundantly
than dead ones. It is not true, though, that relief interferes with
Nature's beneficent law of the survival of the fittest, for the power
to excite sympathy and obtain relief is a kind of fitness. I am still a
devotee of the homely primitive doctrine that mischance, disability or
even unthrift, is not a capital crime justly and profitably punishable
by starvation. I still regard the Good Samaritan with a certain
toleration and Jesus Christ's tenderness to the poor as something more
than a policy of obstruction.

If no such thing as an almshouse, a hospital, an asylum or any one of
the many public establishments for relief of the unfortunate were known
the proposal to found one would indubitably evoke from thousands of
throats notes of deprecation and predictions of disaster. It would be
called Socialism of the radical and dangerous kind--of a kind to menace
the stability of government and undermine the very foundations of
organized society! Yet who is more truly unfortunate than an able-bodied
man out of work through no delinquency of will and no default of effort?
Is hunger to him and his less poignant than to the feeble in body and
mind whom we support for nothing in almshouse or asylum? Are cold and
exposure less disagreeable to him than to them? Is not his claim to the
right to live as valid as theirs if backed by the will to pay for life
with work? And in denial of his claim is there not latent a far greater
peril to society than inheres in denial of theirs? So unfortunate and
dangerous a creature as a man willing to work, yet having no work to do,
should be unknown outside of the literature of satire. Doubtless there
would be enormous difficulties in devising a practicable and beneficent
system, and doubtless the reform, like all permanent and salutary
reforms, will have to grow. The growth naturally will be delayed by
opposition of the workingmen themselves--precisely as they oppose prison
labor from ignorance that labor makes labor.

It matters not that nine in ten of all our tramps and vagrants are such
from choice, and irreclaimable degenerates into the bargain; so long