for existence, each for himself, in the old-fashioned way, without any of the advantages which organization gives their more prosperous brothers.  They represent the survival of an earlier industrial stage.  If the crudest form of the struggle were permitted to rage with unabated force, large numbers of them would be swept out of life, thereby rendering successful organization and industrial advance more possible to the survivors.  But modern notions of humanity insist upon the retention of these superfluous, low-skilled workers, while at the same time failing to recognize, and making no real attempt to provide against, the inevitable result of that retention.  By allowing the continuance of the crude struggle for existence which is the form industrial competition takes when applied to the low-skilled workers, and at the same time forbidding the proved “unfittest” to be cleared out of the world, we seem to perpetuate and intensify the struggle.  The elimination of the “unfit” is the necessary means of progress enforced by the law of competition.  An insistence on the survival, and a permission of continued struggle to the unfit, cuts off the natural avenue of progress for their more fit competitors.  So long as the crude industrial struggle is permitted on these unnatural terms, the effective organization and progress of the main body of low-skilled workers seems a logical impossibility.  If the upper strata of low-class workers are enabled to organize, and, what is more difficult, to protect themselves against incursions of outsiders, the position of the lower strata will become even more hopeless and helpless.  If one by one all the avenues of regular low-skilled labour are closed by securing a practical monopoly of this and that work for the members of a Union, the superfluous body of labourers will be driven more and more to depend on irregular jobs, and forced more and more into concentrated masses of city dwellers, will present an ever-growing difficulty and danger to national order and national health.  Consideration of the general progress of the working-classes has no force to set aside this problem.  It seems not unlikely that we are entering on a new phase of the poverty question.  The upper strata of low-skilled labour are learning to organize.  If they succeed in forming and maintaining strong Unions, that is to say, in lifting themselves from the chaotic struggle of an earlier industrial epoch, so as to get fairly on the road of modern industrial progress, the condition of those left behind will press the illogicality of our present national economy upon us with a dramatic force which will be more convincing than logic, for it will appeal to a growing national sentiment of pity and humanity which will take no denial, and will find itself driven for the first time to a serious recognition of poverty as a national, industrial disease, requiring a national, industrial remedy.

The great problem of poverty thus resides in the conditions of the low-skilled workman.  To live industrially under the new order he must organize.  He cannot organize because he is so poor, so ignorant, so weak.  Because he is not organized he continues to be poor, ignorant, weak.  Here is a great dilemma, of which whoever shall have found the key will have done much to solve the problem of poverty.