184 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
industry is least, their tenure of employment is most easily imperilled. 
The past two winters with armies of unemployed in every large city, 
recruited largely, we are told by competent observers, from the un- 
skilled, bear witness to this fact. 
A consequence of economic insecurity is a weakening of moral tone 
and grip; this is the greatest of all dangers to society. “ Every great 
industrial crisis leaves behind it,” says Dr. Warner, “a legacy of indi- 
vidual degeneracy and personal unthrift.”* “Involuntary idleness 
intensifies and perpetuates incapacity.” Nothing so begets failure as 
the consciousness of failure. The discipline of regular and continuous 
occupation is a support which few can do without. At the recent 
meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a 
member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws held that pauperism 
arises mainly from the casual worker class, that is, in the main, the 
unskilled class whose security of employment is slightest and whose 
mental attitude is therefore least hopeful and healthy. To live on the 
edge of social existence blinds the eyes to the social order which is not 
near the edge. Hopefulness of mind is a social force impossible to 
measure. It is hope which marks the difference between slavery and 
freedom, between stagnation and progress. But insecurity weakens and 
destroys hope, and jf employment continues to be insecure, the result 
must be an increasing body of hopeless men and women, feeding, in- 
evitably, the ranks of criminal and pauper degeneracy. 
Viewed from this point, the significance of unskill becomes tre- 
mendous. lack of skill stands as the bar to mental progress even in 
an unskilled age; but in an age demanding skill, the lack of it is itself 
a condition leading to degeneration. Through unskill, labor is con- 
demned to low wages, a narrow outlook, an inability to meet the modern 
demands of industry; by remaining economically unfit, men become 
socially unfit and are forced for themselves and their children into the 
ceaseless round of struggle for bare subsistence, with consequent hope- 
lessness, bodily decay and resultant misery. It should be clear that in 
refusing to meet the industrial needs of our age for skilled workers the 
nation is condemning a considerable part of its population to an in- 
evitable economic unfitness and resultant mental sterility, since eco- 
nomic well-being is essential to mental stability and progress. Degen- 
eracy, thus, is born of the unskilled hand and the untrained mind. 
There is one further position which needs to be considered. It is 
becoming clear, as investigation into social life proceeds, that human 
progress depends largely upon society’s creative minds, its “ inventors,” 
its originators, whose fertile ideas are passed on to the mind of the mass 
of mankind. It is these suggestive and fruitful ideas which mark the 
stages of advancement and which constitute the essence of civilization. 
+A. G. Warner, “ American Charities,” pp. 103 and 97. 
