They represent the
survival of an earlier industrial stage. If the crudest form of the
struggle were permitted to rage with unabated force, large numbers of
them would be swept out of life, thereby rendering successful
organization and industrial advance more possible to the survivors. But
modern notions of humanity insist upon the retention of these
superfluous, low-skilled workers, while at the same time failing to
recognize, and making no real attempt to provide against, the inevitable
result of that retention. By allowing the continuance of the crude
struggle for existence which is the form industrial competition takes
when applied to the low-skilled workers, and at the same time forbidding
the proved "unfittest" to be cleared out of the world, we seem to
perpetuate and intensify the struggle. The elimination of the "unfit" is
the necessary means of progress enforced by the law of competition. An
insistence on the survival, and a permission of continued struggle to
the unfit, cuts off the natural avenue of progress for their more fit
competitors. So long as the crude industrial struggle is permitted on
these unnatural terms, the effective organization and progress of the
main body of low-skilled workers seems a logical impossibility. If the
upper strata of low-class workers are enabled to organize, and, what is
more difficult, to protect themselves against incursions of outsiders,
the position of the lower strata will become even more hopeless and
helpless.
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