overmastering desire for work? It is a fair question. "Go to work"
is preached to the tramp every day of his life. The judge on the
bench, the pedestrian in the street, the housewife at the kitchen
door, all unite in advising him to go to work. So what would happen
tomorrow if one hundred thousand tramps acted upon this advice and
strenuously and indomitably sought work? Why, by the end of the
week one hundred thousand workers, their places taken by the tramps,
would receive their time and be "hitting the road" for a job.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox unwittingly and uncomfortably demonstrated the
disparity between men and work. {1} She made a casual reference, in
a newspaper column she conducts, to the difficulty two business men
found in obtaining good employees. The first morning mail brought
her seventy-five applications for the position, and at the end of
two weeks over two hundred people had applied.

Still more strikingly was the same proposition recently demonstrated
in San Francisco. A sympathetic strike called out a whole
federation of trades' unions. Thousands of men, in many branches of
trade, quit work,--draymen, sand teamsters, porters and packers,
longshoremen, stevedores, warehousemen, stationary engineers,
sailors, marine firemen, stewards, sea-cooks, and so forth,--an
interminable list. It was a strike of large proportions. Every
Pacific coast shipping city was involved, and the entire coasting
service, from San Diego to Puget Sound, was virtually tied up. The
time was considered auspicious. The Philippines and Alaska had
drained the Pacific coast of surplus labor. It was summer-time,
when the agricultural demand for laborers was at its height, and
when the cities were bare of their floating populations. And yet
there remained a body of surplus labor sufficient to take the places