has ever ventured to denounce the twin vices of industry and obedience.
True, there is the story of blind Samson at the mill; perhaps a parable.

Underfed and overworked for generations, starved from birth, starved
before birth, we drive and harry and crush them, the weakling and his
weaker sons; we exploit them, gull them, poison them, lie to them, filch
from them. We crowd them into our money mills; we deny them youth, we
deny them rest, we deny them opportunity, we deny them hope, or any hope
of hope; and we provide for age--the poorhouse. So that charity is become
of all words the most feared, most hated, most loathed and loathsome;
worse than crime or shame or death. We have left them from the work of
their hands enough, scantly enough, to keep breath within their stunted
bodies. "All the traffic can bear!"--a brazen rule. Of such sage policy
the result can be seen in the wizened and undersized submerged of London;
of nearer than London. Man, by not taking thought, has taken a cubit from
his stature.

Meantime we prate comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural
selection or the inscrutable decrees of God. Whereas this was manifestly
a Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all
that makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, with pinched and
livid lips--unlovely, not unloved; and these iniquitous decrees are most
scrutable, are surely of man's devising and not of God's. Or we invent a
fire-new science, known as Eugenics, to treat the disease by new naming
of symptoms: and prattle of the well born, when we mean well fed; or the
degenerate, when we might more truly say the disinherited.

It is even held by certain poltroons that families have been started
gutterward, of late centuries, when a father has been gloriously slain in
the wars of the useless great. That such a circumstance, however