DEVELOPING SOCIAL ELEMENTS
each generation, there must needs continue to be, in greater or less amount, this individually futile struggle beneath the feet of the race; somewhere and in some form there must still persist those essentials that now take shape as the slum, the prison, and the asylum. All over the world, as the railway network has spread, in Chicago and New York as vividly as in London or Paris, the commencement of the new movement has been marked at once by the appearance of this bulky irremovable excretion, the appearance of these gall stones of vicious, helpless, and pauper masses. There seems every reason to suppose that this phenomenon of unemployed citizens, who are, in fact, unemployable, will remain present as a class, perishing individually and individually renewed, so long as civilisation remains progressive and experimental upon its present lines. Their drowning existences may be utilised, the crude hardship of their lot may be concealed or mitigated,[1] they may react upon the social fabric that is attempting to eliminate them, in very astounding ways, but their presence and their individual doom, it seems to me, will be unavoidable—at any rate for many generations of men. They are an integral
- ↑ A very important factor in this mitigation, a factor over which the humanely minded cannot too greatly rejoice, will be the philanthropic amusements of the irresponsible wealthy. There is a growing class of energetic people—organisers, secretaries, preachers—who cater to the philanthropic instinct, and who are, for all practical purposes, employing a large and increasing section of suitable helpless people in supplying to their customers, by means of religious acquiescence and light moral reforms, that sense of well-doing which is one of the least objectionable of the functionless pleasures of life. The attempts to reinstate these failures by means of subsidised industries will in the end, of course, merely serve to throw out of employment other just subsisting strugglers; it will probably make little or no difference in the net result of the process.
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