THE INDUSTRIAL GROUP 793 



in the social process of production. The capitalistic organization 

 also separates the worker economically from his work. He is no 

 longer economically interested in the results of his work. 



The old servile rights and obligations have been destroyed. Every 

 earlier time has recognized mutual responsibilities with respect to 

 the dependent man, which indeed bound him, made him unfree, but 

 gave him physical and moral support, protected him from hunger, 

 and helped him over crises in his life, such as sickness. Even the 

 slave or serf had this claim upon his lord. The journeyman of the 

 Middle Ages was united to his master by a close fellowship supported 

 by the feeling of moral obligation. This relation is disappearing. 

 The modern workman is a " free " laborer, legally free, who now 

 stands only in a business relation with his employer; services are 

 rated on both sides at a money value. Therewith he is free to go 

 hungry because without protection from commercial crises. He 

 must win his bread from day to day and be prepared at any time to 

 lose his position. In other respects his freedom is a mere formality; 

 he cannot exercise it by not working; he can at best change masters. 

 But this is becoming closed to him because capital is being mono- 

 polized in trusts. As soon as he succeeds in finding work, he is 

 for the greater part of his life driven to the hardest drudgery in the 

 service of the capitalistic undertaker. He is then less free than any 

 Turkish peasant who plows with his oxen in a free field. 



How will, how can this " free," that is to say, uprooted cos- 

 mopolitan live? This is the question which presents itself for him as 

 well as for all who have experienced the same process of emancipa- 

 tion. This is the question of the time, which receives only one 

 definite response from the proletariat. The recovery of the content 

 of life is to be sought in two ways, - - by means of pleasure and by 

 means of labor. Pleasure as one of the features of life is necessarily 

 denied to the great mass, clearly from external causes, perhaps also 

 from internal causes, because people are still too " sensible " to find 

 a motive of life in pure pleasure, material or spiritual, i. e., in 

 estheticism! They still require self-sacrifice, an object, morals. 

 There remains clearly open only the second way, --labor. "To 

 labor and not to despair," has been proclaimed as the watchword for 

 our hollow age. And the poet sings so sweetly 



" Tis labor alone that helps us along 



Over this wilderness of gloomy doubt; 

 It gives to each passing moment a goal 

 Which our life itself is without." 



But how is it with the labor of the wage-earner? Often enough 

 he has no work at all. The condition known as " being out of work " 

 has established itself as a matter-of-course accompaniment of capital- 



