“‘There are two ways of looking at this winter’s unemployed problem,’ said Dr. Parker; ’one is fatally bad and the other promises good.  One way is shallow and biased; the other strives to use the simple rules of science for the analysis of any problem.  One way is to damn the army of the unemployed and the irresponsible, irritating vagrants who will not work.  The other way is to admit that any such social phenomenon as this army is just as normal a product of our social organization as our own university.

“’Much street-car and ferry analysis of this problem that I have overheard seems to believe that this army created its own degraded self, that a vagrant is a vagrant from personal desire and perversion.  This analysis is as shallow as it is untrue.  If unemployment and vagrancy are the product of our careless, indifferent society over the half-century, then its cure will come only by a half-century’s careful regretful social labor by this same tardy society.

“’The riot at Sacramento is merely the appearance of the problem from the back streets into the strong light.  The handling of the problem there is unhappily in accord with the careless, cruel attitude of society on this question.  We are willing to respect the anxiety of Sacramento, threatened in the night with this irresponsible, reckless invasion; but how can the city demand of vagrants observance of the law, when they drop into mob-assertion the minute the problem comes up to them?’”

The illustration he always used to express his opinion of the average solution of unemployment, I quote from a paper of his on that subject, written in the spring of 1915.

“There is an old test for insanity which is made as follows:  the suspect is given a cup, and is told to empty a bucket into which water is running from a faucet.  If the suspect turns off the water before he begins to bail out the bucket, he is sane.  Nearly all the current solutions of unemployment leave the faucet running. . . .

“The heart of the problem, the cause, one might well say, of unemployment, is that the employment of men regularly or irregularly is at no time an important consideration of those minds which control industry.  Social organization has ordered it that these minds shall be interested only in achieving a reasonable profit in the manufacture and the sale of goods.  Society has never demanded that industries be run even in part to give men employment.  Rewards are not held out for such a policy, and therefore it is unreasonable to expect such a performance.  Though a favorite popular belief is that we must ‘work to live,’ we have no current adage of a ‘right to work.’  This winter there are shoeless men and women, closed shoe-factories, and destitute shoemakers; children in New England with no woolen clothing, half-time woolen mills, and unemployed spinners and weavers.  Why?  Simply because the mills cannot turn out the reasonable business profit; and since that is the only promise that can galvanize them into activity, they stand idle, no matter how much humanity finds of misery and death in this decision.  This statement is not a peroration to a declaration for Socialism.  It seems a fair rendering of the matter-of-fact logic of the analysis.