This table shows that 44.32% of the persons assisted were “co-assisted”; that 8.8% have become indigent through the death or injury of the breadwinner of the family; that there are, therefore, 53.12% of those assisted the cause of whose indigence is not to be found in the persons themselves, but in their social environment. (Generally such persons are spoken of as not being poor through their “own fault”, a term so vague that it would be well to discontinue its use.) 1.34% are persons with a large family, whose wages are too small to support so many; 2.23% are out of employment, i.e. they wish to work but can find nothing to do; 12.32% are prevented from working by old age. Consequently we reach the figure of 69.01% for those who have become indigent through causes which do not depend upon themselves. Finally come 25.25% of those assisted who have been injured, or are sick, or have bodily or intellectual infirmities. Further, there are social causes which play a great part in the etiology of the cases we have been discussing (bad housing conditions favoring tuberculosis, lack of protective devices for dangerous machines, causing injuries, etc.). Others of these persons are born weak or sickly, in which case we may speak of individual causes of poverty, although social conditions have contributed in their turn by their influence on the parents to make the children wretched. It is, however, a social phenomenon that the sick and weak of the proletariat are left to shift for themselves. They find themselves in that condition only because they do not possess the means of production, and are no longer in a condition to sell their labor. Many times we read in treatises upon morals how shameful it is that nomadic peoples abandon or kill their sick and aged, and how by these customs they give proof of their inferior morality. But those who speak in this way forget how, notwithstanding our present civilization, a great number of persons still pass their old age in the direst poverty; they forget also that the manner in which the nomadic peoples live forces them to rid themselves of their sick and aged, because it would be impossible to take them with them; they forget also that, on account of the limited power that nomads have over nature, they find themselves in exceedingly difficult material circumstances, so that their manner of acting is not judged immoral by any of their own families who suffer by it; [289] finally they forget that the productivity of labor is so enormous at present that all the sick and aged could be supported; a part of the money spent in superfluous luxuries would be ample for this purpose.