THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 147 
least, there is everywhere time for a fairly earned leisure to advance 
in moral, mental education, and to train families to higher and 
better life. 
If, unfortunately, mankind has chosen the worse way, some having 
possession of the best sites can live without producing, simply by 
exacting from those who do produce, and therefore need these sites. 
As civilization advances, as inventions multiply, as division of labor 
stimulates enormously the production of wealth, these site owners, 
while relatively becoming fewer in number, increase in wealth in pro- 
portion to the industrial development of society. 
Side by side with this non-producing class is the great army of 
industrials, professional, mercantile, artizan and primary. These 
last, driven from their work ground through the holding of sites out of 
use or out of their reach, are fain to seek employment elsewhere. 
They force their way among artizan producers, who, to escape the 
increased competition, seek relief among the mercantiles. These 
again, through stress of competition also, enter into and over-people 
the class of professionals. Throughout all these divisions of the 
great industrial class there seem to be too many men and too much 
of things produced. The all-pervading and evil competition makes 
a livelihood generally a precarious boon. They are happy indeed to 
whom circumstances have assured a competence or a permanent 
means of subsistence. But these, too, are conscious of uncertainty— 
that they hold their happy lot by but a slender thread, and this once 
broken may never again be so fortunately joined. The place they 
vacate is promptly filled and they find themselves among the number 
of those constantly seeking employment, but only occasionally 
finding it. 
This uncertainty of employment and success is productive of 
over-anxiety and worry. Sanatoriums abound and are crowded with 
mental and physical wrecks—the wounded in life’s bitter and in- 
‘cessant conflict. ‘The need for lunatic asylums increases faster than 
funds are provided for their erection, and they are filled to over- 
flowing, as soon as built, with the permanently disabled; while 
mortuary statistics reveal the awful fact that suicides—the killed in 
the same great battle—are increasing in numbers more rapidly than 
natural deaths. 
Besides this seething mass of struggling humanity, there is 
another and lower class still, the outlaws of society, the tramps of 
