for charity, but for work, asking only to be allowed the privilege of
perpetual hard labour, that thereby he may earn wherewith to fill his
empty belly and silence the cry of his children for food. Crying for it
and not getting it, seeking for labour as lost treasure and finding it
not, until at last, all spirit and vigour worn out in the weary quest,
the once willing worker becomes a broken-down drudge, sodden with
wretchedness and despairing of all help in this world or in that which
is to come. Our organisation of industry certainly leaves much to be
desired. A problem which even slave owners have solved ought not to be
abandoned as insoluble by the Christian civilisation of the Nineteenth
Century.

I have already given a few life stories taken down from the lip: of
those who were found homeless on the Embankment which suggest somewhat
of the hardships and the misery of the fruitless search for work.
But what a volume of dull, squalid horror--a horror of great darkness
gradually obscuring all the light of day from the life of the sufferer
might be written from the simple prosaic experiences of the ragged
fellows whom you meet every day in the street. These men, whose labour
is their only capital, are allowed, nay compelled to waste day after
day by the want of any means of employment, and then when they have
seen days and weeks roll by during which their capital has been wasted
by pounds and pounds, they are lectured for not saving the pence.
When a rich man cannot employ his capital he puts it out at interest,
but the bank for the labour capital of the poor man has yet to be
invented. Yet it might be worth while inventing one. A man's labour
is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never
more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable
the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the
most urgent tasks before civilisation.