Therefore, even today, we find that wherever that condition which we call
modern civilisation prevails, and in proportion as it tends to prevail--
wherever steam-power, electricity, or the forces of wind and water, are
compelled by man's intellectual activity to act as the motor-powers in the
accomplishment of human toil, wherever the delicate adaptions of
scientifically constructed machinery are taking the place of the simple
manipulation of the human hand--there has arisen, all the world over, a
large body of males who find that their ancient fields of labour have
slipped or are slipping from them, and who discover that the modern world
has no place or need for them. At the gates of our dockyards, in our
streets, and in our fields, are to be found everywhere, in proportion as
modern civilisation is really dominant, men whose bulk and mere animal
strength would have made them as warriors invaluable members of any
primitive community, and who would have been valuable even in any simpler
civilisation than our own, as machines of toil; but who, owing to lack of
intellectual or delicate manual training, have now no form of labour to
offer society which it stands really in need of, and who therefore tend to
form our Great Male Unemployed--a body which finds the only powers it
possesses so little needed by its fellows that, in return for its intensest
physical labour, it hardly earns the poorest sustenance. The material
conditions of life have been rapidly modified, and the man has not been
modified with them; machinery has largely filled his place in his old field
of labour, and he has found no new one.

It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarian
standpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, and who
might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was the
dominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their
people, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the male