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Updated: May 2, 2025
It was there that I first discovered the dimensions of the problem of the unemployed, and my first great surprise in the country was to find thousands of men in what I supposed to be the most wonderful Eldorado on earth, workless, and many of them homeless. An advertisement in the morning paper calling for a "bed-hand" whatever that might mean led me to a big lodging-house on the Bowery.
Now, when fortune has laid such a load of sorrow upon the working people of Lancashire, it is a sad thing to see so many workless minstrels of humble life "chanting their artless notes in simple guise" upon the streets of great towns, amongst a kind of life they are little used to. There is something very touching, too, in their manner and appearance.
Why indeed impossible, seeing that millions of acres wait to be tilled and to yield their treasures to the unfed mouths of workless labourers? Why impossible, since hundreds of thousands are saying, it is not charity, we crave, but the privilege to work and earn our bread?
This gave her strength to throw the old man from her; he crashed into the grate; she heard his head strike against the coal-box. Mavis cast one look upon the shapeless and bleeding heap of humanity and left the room. Mavis was again workless, this time with a capital of fifteen shillings and sixpence halfpenny.
There were millions of men out of work last winter. The political parties took no notice. The leaders knew the minds of the electors. They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any connection between government and work. Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could do to find employment. "God knows!" was his reply.
At later dates he issued Orders and Regulations for Territorial Commissioners and Chief Secretaries, containing 176 pages, and Orders and Regulation's for Social Officers, the latter a complete explanation of his thoughts and wishes for the conduct of every form of effort for the elevation of the homeless and workless and fallen; and Orders and Regulations for Local Officers, containing precise details as to the duties of all the various non-commissioned or lay Officers, whether engaged in work for old or young.
They watched their neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty virulent curiosity of the workless at whatever passed in the streets below them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their fire-escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes the passing of something ice-wagons, undertakers' wagons, ole-clo' men, Ruth surmised.
Our object is to find work for these workless multitudes, and such work as shall more than pay for the very humble pittance the Indian destitute requires. He must be a poor specimen of a human being who cannot fairly earn his anna or two annas a day, and our brains must be poor addled affairs, if in this great vast world of ours we cannot find that amount of work for him to do.
We could not prevent all food from passing into the British Islands, but at least we had raised what did get in to a price which put it far beyond the means of the penniless, workless multitudes. In vain Government commandeered it all and doled it out as a general feeds the garrison of a fortress. The task was too great the responsibility too horrible.
It shows itself in the decline of farming and in the workless city population kept quiet by their dole of bread and their circuses, whose life contrasted so dramatically, so terribly with that of the haughty senatorial families and the great landowners in their palatial villas and town houses.
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