have no current adage of a 'right to work.' This winter there are
shoeless men and women, closed shoe-factories, and destitute shoemakers;
children in New England with no woolen clothing, half-time woolen mills,
and unemployed spinners and weavers. Why? Simply because the mills
cannot turn out the reasonable business profit; and since that is the
only promise that can galvanize them into activity, they stand idle, no
matter how much humanity finds of misery and death in this decision.
This statement is not a peroration to a declaration for Socialism. It
seems a fair rendering of the matter-of-fact logic of the analysis.

"It seems hopeless, and also unfair, to expect out-of-work insurance,
employment bureaus, or philanthropy, to counteract the controlling force
of profit-seeking. There is every reason to believe that profit-seeking
has been a tremendous stimulus to economic activity in the past. It is
doubtful if the present great accumulation of capital would have come
into existence without it. But to-day it seems as it were to be caught
up by its own social consequences. It is hard to escape from the
insistence of a situation in which the money a workman makes in a year
fails to cover the upkeep of his family; and this impairment of the
father's income through unemployment has largely to be met by child-and
woman-labor. The Federal Immigration Commission's report shows that in
not a single great American industry can the average yearly income of
the father keep his family. Seven hundred and fifty dollars is the bare
minimum for the maintenance of the average-sized American industrial
family. The average yearly earnings of the heads of families working in
the United States in the iron and steel industry is $409; in bituminous
coal-mining $451; in the woolen industry $400; in silk $448; in cotton
$470; in clothing $530; in boots and shoes $573; in leather $511; in
sugar-refining $549; in the meat industry $578; in furniture $598, etc.