=The War and the Future.= The world war has brought us face to face with a new task. The United States and Canada are at present the producing nations of the world. The Anti-Loafer laws now being carried through are cleaning out the cabarets, the poolrooms, the theaters, and other places where idle men congregate. It will be years before we are faced with the same serious situation that has faced us in the past. However, when our huge armies are demobilized and “Johnny comes marching home,” there will be a new problem which will have to be considered. How can these men be fitted back into industrial life without increasing the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers to such a degree that we will again be faced with a huge army of unemployed? In periods of unemployment it is the common laborer who suffers most. We have failed to realize this. And yet he makes a big contribution to all progress. You cannot build a bridge without him and, in fact, he is used in every enterprise. Because of his lack of skill, and also because of his too common habits of living, we call these men tramps and hobos, and refer to them in the mass as common laborers. As a matter of fact no man who does any work is a common man. They are ignorant for the most part; vicious in many cases; some are lazy, drunken, shiftless--all of these things; but at the same time they are the men who are cutting down the trees, sawing up the logs, forming them into rafts, floating them down the river, and putting them through the mills. They are the men who are loading the ships at our docks, the men who pick hops and work in the harvest fields; pick the fruit and do the thousand other things that have to be done when the season is right. Besides these, there are the thousands of women who are driven at top speed at certain periods of the year through the unusual demands of industry, and then are thrown out of employment for long periods. Ignorant, unknown, friendless, and made the victims of industrial conditions over which they have no control, they seem of so little importance in the vast system--as merely the lesser cogs in the lesser wheels--that very few know of their existence except when something goes wrong with the cogs, and the whole machine is shut down because of the break. But without them the machine could not run at all. The casual workers are the true servants of humanity, and yet they are the ones that are passed by unnoticed; the ones that rarely if ever are influenced by the church. They constitute a great army of neglected men and women, a challenge to the church, a menace to society, and a danger to our commonwealth; and all because they are neglected and unknown. CHAPTER X THE WORLD OF INDUSTRIAL WOMEN