If one by one all the avenues of regular low-skilled labour
are closed by securing a practical monopoly of this and that work for
the members of a Union, the superfluous body of labourers will be driven
more and more to depend on irregular jobs, and forced more and more into
concentrated masses of city dwellers, will present an ever-growing
difficulty and danger to national order and national health.
Consideration of the general progress of the working-classes has no
force to set aside this problem. It seems not unlikely that we are
entering on a new phase of the poverty question. The upper strata of
low-skilled labour are learning to organize. If they succeed in forming
and maintaining strong Unions, that is to say, in lifting themselves
from the chaotic struggle of an earlier industrial epoch, so as to get
fairly on the road of modern industrial progress, the condition of those
left behind will press the illogicality of our present national economy
upon us with a dramatic force which will be more convincing than logic,
for it will appeal to a growing national sentiment of pity and humanity
which will take no denial, and will find itself driven for the first
time to a serious recognition of poverty as a national, industrial
disease, requiring a national, industrial remedy.
The great problem of poverty thus resides in the conditions of the low-
skilled workman. To live industrially under the new order he must
organize.
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