As I review these very first impressions of the workers in
unskilled industries, living in a depressed quarter of the city,
I realize how easy it was for us to see exceptional cases of
hardship as typical of the average lot, and yet, in spite of
alleviating philanthropy and labor legislation, the indictment of
Tolstoy applied to Moscow thirty years ago still fits every
American city: "Wherever we may live, if we draw a circle around
us of a hundred thousand, or a thousand, or even of ten miles
circumference, and look at the lives of those men and women who
are inside our circle, we shall find half-starved children, old
people, pregnant women, sick and weak persons, working beyond
their strength, who have neither food nor rest enough to support
them, and who, for this reason, die before their time; we shall
see others, full grown, who are injured and needlessly killed by
dangerous and hurtful tasks."
As the American city is awakening to self-consciousness, it
slowly perceives the civic significance of these industrial
conditions, and perhaps Chicago has been foremost in the effort
to connect the unregulated overgrowth of the huge centers of
population, with the astonishingly rapid development of
industrial enterprises; quite as Chicago was foremost to carry on
the preliminary discussion through which a basis was laid for
likemindedness and the coordination of diverse wills.
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