=The Unemployed.= The unemployed man presents a real problem to society. Carlyle said, “A man willing to work, and unable to find work is, perhaps, the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under the sun.” Many well-to-do people living in comfortable circumstances, with position and income assured, assert that if a man wants work he can always find it, and that the only men unemployed are the shiftless and the lazy. Right now the war has absorbed all the surplus labor, and a condition exists different from any that we have previously known in the history of America. Immigration has been cut off and the demands for new enterprises have called for hundreds of thousands of new workers, so that at the present time there is no reason why any man should be out of work. In fact, so serious has the need for men become that the latest interpretation put upon the draft law amounts practically to a conscription of labor for all men of draft age. =The Banana Boat.= A whistle sounded on the Mississippi river just below New Orleans early one afternoon last summer. It was a dismal, rainy day, and as the long screech died away the sound seemed almost prophetic of some coming disaster. Soon a huge steamship painted drab-gray, with a red diamond upon its smoke-stack, nosed its way from out of the mist and crowded in close to the pier. Scarcely were the ropes fast when there began to appear on the dock men black and white, ragged, unkempt fellows who had hurried from the near-by saloons, poolrooms, and other lounging places. This boat was just in from Central America loaded down with bananas. Two enormous unloaders were set up alongside of the vessel. The machinery of these started and an endless belt, which traveled to the bottom of the hold and out again, came up loaded with bunches of bananas. The fruit was brought down and thrown upon a table. Here two men, standing one on either side of the traveling belt, would take hold of a bunch of bananas and place it upon the shoulders of a third man, who in turn carried it off to the waiting freight-car. Fifty men went to work almost immediately; twenty an hour later in the afternoon; and at nine o’clock that night, under the glare of the electric lights, ninety-two men were busily engaged in carrying the fruit and storing it in the freight-cars.