and upon the same soil. What robs the wages-receiver of the years of life to which as son of a given race and inhabitant of a given country, he is entitled? Hunger, wretchedness, want of all kinds, these slowly undermine his health and weaken his constitution. The wages he receives are also, at best, merely sufficient to protect him from pressing hunger and cold, they do not avert the gradual wasting away of his whole being, from insufficient food, clothing and rest. The statistics of the records of disease and death among the laboring classes of Europe, brand the "iron law of wages" as an infamous lie.
The portrait of the economic organization of society would not be complete if I omitted to describe along with the recklessly extravagant millionaire and the laboring man, condemned inexorably to disease and an early death, another class of beings who play in our present conditions of social life, nearly as melancholy a role as the industrial slaves of the great city. These are the cultivated men without any regular income, who have to support themselves by intellectual labor. The supply exceeds the demand in this branch of labor, to a frightful degree. The so-called liberal professions are everywhere so over-crowded that those who seek in them a livelihood, trample upon each other until the struggle for existence assumes in them the gravest and most hideous phases. Those unfortunates whose efforts are directed to obtaining a public or private situation, a position to teach, or success in art, literature, the law, medicine, civil engineering, etc., are capable of appreciating their wretchedness in a greater degree, on account of their higher intellectual development. Their intimate intercourse with those more prosperous keeps the picture of wealth constantly before them, side by side with that of their own poverty, which is thus never forgotten. Social prejudices require them
