exists between spiritual theory and the realities of the social order
that it might almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all
on our civilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point
where we could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery. Here God possesses
the world."

The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, sees him
laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, on
strike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringing
children into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliest
years, a pauper when his days of strength are passed. He dies in
charitable institutions. Though his labors are necessary he is yet not
integrated into the national economy. He has no share of his own in the
wealth of the nation. He cannot claim work as a right from the holders
of economic power, and this absolute dependence upon the autocrats of
industry for a livelihood is the greatest evil of any, for it puts a
spiritual curse on him and makes him in effect a slave. Instinctively
he adopts a servile attitude to those who can sentence him and his
children to poverty and hunger without trial or judgment by his peers.
A hasty word, and he may be told to draw his pay and begone. The
spiritual wrong done him by the social order is greater than the
material ill, and that spiritual wrong is no less a wrong because
generation after generation of workers have grown up and are habituated
to it, and do not realize the oppression; because in childhood
circumstance and the black art of education alike conspire to make the
worker humble in heart and to take the crown and sceptre from his
spirit, and his elders are already tamed and obsequious.

Yet the workers in the modern world have great qualities. This class in
great masses will continually make sacrifices for the sake of a