We find workingmen organized into armies of
producers because men of executive ability and business
sagacity have found it to their interests thus to organize
them. But these workingmen are not organized socially;
although lodging in crowded tenement houses, they are
living without a corresponding social contact. The chaos
is as great as it would be were they working in huge
factories without foremen or superintendent. Their ideas
and resources are cramped, and the desire for higher
social pleasure becomes extinct. They have no share in
the traditions and social energy which make for progress.
Too often their only place of meeting is a saloon, their
only host a bartender; a local demagogue forms their
public opinion. Men of ability and refinement, of social
power and university cultivation, stay away from them.
Personally, I believe the men who lose most are those who
thus stay away. But the paradox is here; when cultivated
people do stay away from a certain portion of the
population, when all social advantages are persistently
withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is
pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument, for the
continued withholding.
It is constantly said that because the masses have never
had social advantages, they do want them, that they are
heavy and dull, and that it will take political or
philanthropic machinery to change them.
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