The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamour for them. There
are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The dockers
crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman does
not give them a call. The engineers who have work pay six shillings a
week to their brother engineers who can find nothing to do; 514,000
textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment of children
under fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to toil under the
sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours. Alfred Freeman
crawls to muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen Hughes Hunt
prefers Regent's Canal to Islington Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts the
throats of his wife and children because he cannot find work enough to
give them food and shelter.
The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten,
dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution--of the
prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and
sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour. If this is the
best that civilisation can do for the human, then give us howling and
naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert,
of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine
and the Abyss.
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