The radical changes in the economic system upset life even for those who remain in the same place. It is rare nowadays that people earn their bread in the same way that their fathers did; they have to turn to new occupations, form new habits and think new thoughts. Even farming, the ancient type of stability, is rapidly being transformed, and the farmer with it. Moreover, it often happens that an occupation does not last a lifetime; and one who has achieved efficiency and high pay in it feels it drop from under him, leaving him to begin again as a common laborer. This may happen several times to the same man. To all this we must add the irregularity of employment due to the ups and downs of modern industry and to labor troubles, the result being a rather general condition of insecurity and strain. Men and families are thrown out of the system, others are disquieted by apprehension, and nearly all feel that their houses are builded on the sand, so that they cannot easily have that confidence in the stability of their livelihood upon which mental and moral stability largely depend. The principle that human character deteriorates under irregular and uncertain employment is an old one and, I believe, undisputed. There are innumerable cases like the following: “When he moved to Peoria he had regular work for some months, until a lull threw him out. Then he began to loaf on the corner, and has never since desired anything more. ‘It’s easy,’ he said, ‘and I get enough to live on. If I get sick there’s the hospitals.’” Where there is a class of workers subject to such conditions, like the lumberjacks and steamboat-hands of the Great Lakes, or the wheat-harvesters of the Northwest, it is almost invariably found that their lives are morally as well as industrially irregular; and though this may be partly due to the fact that such work attracts an unstable class of men, there is no reasonable doubt that the work itself causes instability.