114 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY 



and a full century of social reforms during which 

 we destroyed monarchical tyranny, abolished human 

 slavery, established a sound currency, reduced greatly 

 the hours of labor, granted universal suffrage, and 

 adopted countless other reforms, we find most of the 

 country unemployed, reduced to poverty, dependent 

 upon charity, in terror of ruin! In spite of the fact 

 that the whole history of industrial expansion and 

 social reform is filled with demonstrations of the im- 

 possibility of establishing security, much less happi- 

 ness, by any measures which still leave the individual 

 dependent for his living upon the industrial behemoth, 

 what has thus far been done and what is now proposed 

 by industrial leaders, politicians, and economists is in 

 the main merely a continuance of the futile process of 

 trying to produce prosperity by creating new indus- 

 tries, expanding credit, cheapening money, spreading 

 work, shortening hours of labor, or establishing un- 

 employment insurance. 



Yesterday a young married man I know lost his 

 position. The manufacturing company for which he 

 had been working for four years as a salesman had to 

 let him go. There had been nothing wrong with his 

 work ; the volume of the company's business had sim- 

 ply declined to a point which made it imperative that 

 they lay off another man, and as the youngest sales- 

 man on the staff, he was the one to be dropped. 



For months he and his wife had lived in terror of 

 this possibility. A six-months-old baby, with the added 



