Mein Kampf
Minds of this sort do not readily take in the fact that welfare activity has nothing to do with this, and that it has no claim whatever to gratitude, since it is not distributing bounty, but restoring rights.
I was preserved from learning the social question in this way. It drew me into its magic circle of suffering, and thus seemed not to invite me to “learn,” but to try its strength on me. No credit to it if I, the guinea pig, survived the operation safe and sound.
If now I try to reproduce my sensations of that time, I can never do so in any way approaching completeness; only the essential, to me often the most staggering impressions are to be described here, along with the few lessons I could see in them at that time.
I seldom had much difficulty in finding work as such, since I was not a skilled worker, but had to earn my bread as best I could as a so-called helper, and often as a day laborer.
I took the attitude of the men who shake the dust of Europe from their feet in indomitable determination to build a new life and a new home in the New World. Freed of every previous hampering preconception of occupation and estate, of background and tradition, they grasp any means of earning which is offered, go at any job, and gradually arrive at the realization that honest labor is no disgrace, no matter what kind of labor it may be. I too was thus determined to leap with both feet into a world new to me, and to hew my way through.
I soon learned that there is always some kind of work; but I learned just as quickly how easy it is to lose again.
The insecurity of one’s daily bread soon grew to be in my eyes one of the darkest aspects of the new life.
No doubt the skilled worker is turned out on the street less often than the unskilled; but even he does not altogether escape that fate. Instead of losing his livelihood through lack of work, he is locked out, or he strikes.
Here the insecurity of earning a living is reflected catastrophically in the whole economic system.
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