unemployed: "Give us labour or we die!" (The problem of the unemployed
male is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the unemployed female.
It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its present form
as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes began to sever the
agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him of his ancient forms of
social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it may be called a modern
problem.)

Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of the males of
the modern civilised world that these changes in the material conditions of
life have told in such fashion as to take all useful occupation from them
and render them wholly or partly worthless to society. If the modern man's
field of labour has contracted at one end (the physical), at the other (the
intellectual) it has immeasurably expanded! If machinery and the command
of inanimate motor-forces have rendered of comparatively little value the
male's mere physical motor-power, the demand upon his intellectual
faculties, the call for the expenditure of nervous energy, and the exercise
of delicate manipulative skill in the labour of human life, have
immeasurably increased.

In a million new directions forms of honoured and remunerative social
labour are opening up before the feet of the modern man, which his
ancestors never dreamed of; and day by day they yet increase in numbers and
importance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, the patent road-maker, the
railway-train, the electric tram-car, the steam-driven mill, the Maxim gun
and the torpedo boat, once made, may perform their labours with the
guidance and assistance of comparatively few hands; but a whole army of men
of science, engineers, clerks, and highly-trained workmen is necessary for
their invention, construction, and maintenance. In the domains of art, of
science, of literature, and above all in the field of politics and