Even at the best, much of the real difficulty is often the subjective one summed up in the sentence of a man who has wide knowledge of wage-earners in America, to whom I once spoke of the surprising ease with which I found employment everywhere, except in larger towns. “Oh, yes,” he replied; “but you forget how little gifted with imagination the people are who commonly form by far the greater number of the unemployed.” It merely serves to show again the futility of generalizing about labor, as though it were a commodity like any other, sensitive to the play of the law of supply and demand, while supported by a thorough knowledge of markets and the means of reaching quickly those that, for the time, are the most favorable. The mass which men speak casually of as “labor” is an aggregation of individuals, each with his human ties and prejudices and his congenital weaknesses and strength, and each with his own salvation to work out through difficulties without and within that are little understood from the outside. You may enter his world and share his life, however rigid, sustained by the knowledge that at any moment you may leave it, and your experience, although the nearest approach that you can make, is yet removed almost by infinity from that of the man at your side, who was born to manual labor and bred to it, and whose whole life, physical and mental, has been moulded by its hard realities. It would be quite true to say that “the problem of the unemployed in America is a problem of the distribution of workers,” taking them from regions where many men are looking for a job, to other regions, where many jobs are looking for a man. But it would be a shallow truth, with little insight into the real condition of multitudes, whose life-struggle is for day’s bread and in whom the gregarious instinct is an irresistible gravitation. It is not difficult to show that congestion in an industrial centre, with its accompanying misery, might be relieved by an exodus to country districts, where an unsatisfied demand for hands is chronic. But the human adjustments involved in the change would be beyond all calculation; and, even were they effected, it would be not a little disturbing in the end to find large numbers returning to the town, frankly preferring want with companionship and a sense of being in touch with their time to the comparative plenty and, with it, the loneliness and isolation of country living. A part of the penalty that one pays for attempting to deal with elements so fascinating as those of human nature is in their very incalculability, in the elusive charm of men who develop the best that is in them in spite of circumstances the most adverse, and in an evasive quality in others who sometimes fail to respond to the best devised plans for their betterment. But human nature never loses its interest, and, as earnest of a good time coming, there are always men in every generation who, through unselfish service of their fellows, have won