I have set forth above the numerous causes which prevent the workman from selling his labor. Forced idleness has become chronic little by little, reaching its acute stage in times of crisis. Then seasonal trades make the work of thousands dependent upon the weather. Aside from general causes, which affect whole groups, there are also individual causes. A workman displeases his employer, it may be because he is one of the leaders of a union, or for some other reason; he is discharged, and runs, especially in times of economic depression, the risk of not being able to find employment elsewhere. If the worker falls ill or is injured (this often happens as a consequence of an unhealthful or dangerous trade), or when he reaches old age (and hard work ages men quickly), he is condemned. If the period of idleness lasts long the workman loses his ability and the habit of working (for working is above all a habit), and the time is not far distant when he will become altogether incapable of working. The intellectual condition of the working class is easily understood. In his youth the child learns but little. The circle of his ideas remains restricted, since his parents have ordinarily neither the knowledge, the opportunity, nor the desire to supplement the little that is learnt at school. At the age when the child begins to think for himself, and his aptitudes begin to manifest themselves, he is put to work. The little that the proletarian has learned in his childhood is quickly forgotten under the pressure of the long, monotonous toil, which dulls his intelligence and makes him thus less sensitive to higher impressions. Even if this were not the case, the long duration of labor fatigues the workman too much, his domestic life does not permit him to develop himself, and further he has no money for intellectual pleasures. The pleasures of the workman belong to his kind of life. Consequently his amusements are rough and coarse. Alcohol and sexual intercourse are often the only pleasures he knows. [272] The life of the working-man is less retired than that of the bourgeois. He sees continually the misery of his companions, which is also his own, he feels himself more at one with them, but the demand for labor always remaining below the supply, competition among the workers arouses antagonistic feeling among them. The possibility of some day becoming rich being almost entirely cut out, the working-man is less avaricious than the bourgeois, and less economical; he lives from day to day, and if he happens to get a little more than usual at any time he spends it at once. The situation may be summed up as follows: under the capitalistic system the greater part of the population, the part upon whose labor the entire social fabric is based, lives under the most miserable conditions. The proletariat is badly clothed, badly fed, miserably housed, exhausted by excessive and often deleterious labor, uncertain as to income, and ignorant and coarse. [273]