The most obvious need of class-consciousness is for self-assertion against the pressure of other classes, and this is both most necessary and most difficult with those who lack wealth and the command over organized forces which it implies. In a free society, especially, the Lord helps those who help themselves; and those who are weak in money must be strong in union, and must also exert themselves to make good any deficiency in leadership that comes from ability deserting to more favored classes. That the dominant power of wealth has an oppressive action, for the most part involuntary, upon the people below, will hardly be denied by any competent student. The industrial progress of our time is accompanied by sufferings that are involved with the progress. These sufferings—at least in their more tangible forms—fall almost wholly upon the poorer classes, while the richer get a larger share of the increased product which the progress brings. By sufferings I mean not only the physical hardship and liability to disease, early decay, and mutilation or death by accident, which fall to the hand-worker; but also the debasement of children by premature and stunting labor, the comparative lack of intellectual and social opportunities, the ugly and discouraging surroundings, and the insecurity of employment, to which he and his are subject. There is no purpose to inflict these things; but they are inflicted, and the only remedy is a public consciousness, especially in the classes who suffer from them, of their causes and the means by which they can be done away with. The principal expressions of class-consciousness in the hand-working classes in our day are labor unions and that wider, vaguer, more philosophical or religious movement, too various for definition, which is known as socialism. Regarding the latter I will only say at present that it includes much of what is most vital in the contemporary working of the democratic spirit; the large problems with which its doctrines deal I prefer to discuss in my own way. Labor unions are a simpler matter. They have arisen out of the urgent need of self-defence, not so much against deliberate aggression as against brutal confusion and neglect. The industrial population has been tossed about on the swirl of economic change like so much sawdust on a river, sometimes prosperous, sometimes miserable, never secure, and living largely under degrading, inhuman conditions. Against this state of things the higher class of artisans—as measured by skill, wages and general intelligence—have made a partly successful struggle through coöperation in associations, which, however, include much less than half of those who might be expected to take advantage of them.[127] That they are an effective means of class self-assertion is evident from the antagonism they have aroused.