THE SURPLUS PEOPLE 



manufacturers. The enterprising shoemaker to illus- 

 trate could build u little shop in his yard, purchase a 

 cheap kit of tools, and manufacture in a small way. If 

 he had taste, thrift, and industry, he prospered, and 

 perhaps built up a large business. The man who did 

 that thirty years ago could not hope to do it to-day, 

 simply because the conditions are such as to prevent him 

 from getting his first foothold. As a petty manufact- 

 urer he could not possibly compete with the great man- 

 ufacturers employing large capital and costly machin- 

 ery. His only recourse is to become an employe of a 

 richer man or corporation. He is denied even the chance 

 to bring himself to the test of the rule of the survival 

 of the fittest among employers and manufacturers, be- 

 cause he cannot be born into that exclusive family. The 

 unborn have no opportunity of survival. As with the shoo 

 industry, so with most other common lines of production. 



The decline of the small tradesmen in great cities is a 

 pitiful, even if familiar, spectacle. Sixth Avenue in 

 New York furnishes a luminous instance. This thor- 

 oughfare used to be a paradise of small merchants, deal- 

 ing in their several lines of goods, and winning a fail- 

 average prosperity in the midst of lively competition. 

 To-day a few great stores stand like monuments in that 

 graveyard of small merchants. Competition between 

 the old conditions and the new is impossible. 



Even the professions are not exempt from the influ- 

 ences which have wrought such changes in the lives of 

 small capitalists and skilled workmen. Self-respecting 

 young men and women do not willingly and deliberately 

 set out upon lives which deny them independence of 

 thought and action, and no opportunity to rise except as 



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