A few moments before twelve a great box of bread is pushed outside the door, and exactly on the hour a portly, round-faced German takes his position by it, and calls: “Ready!” The whole line at once, like a well-drilled company of regulars, moves quickly, in good marching time, diagonally across the sidewalk to the inner edge and pushes, with only the noise of tramping feet, past the box. Each man reaches for a loaf and, breaking line, wanders off by himself. Most of them do not even glance at their bread but put it indifferently under their coats or in their pockets. They betake themselves heaven knows where--to lodging houses, park benches (if it be summer), hall-bedrooms possibly, although in most cases it is doubtful if they possess one, or to charitable missions of the poor. It is a small thing to get, a loaf of dry bread, but from three hundred to four hundred men will gather nightly from one year’s end to the other to get it, and so it has its significance. The thing that I protest against is that it endures. It would be so easy, as it seems to me, in a world of even moderate organization to do something that would end a spectacle of this kind once and for all, if it were no more than a law to destroy the inefficient. I say this not in cruelty but more particularly with the intention of awakening thought. There is so much to do. In America the nation’s roads have not even begun to be made. Over vast stretches of the territory of the world the land is not tilled. There is not a tithe made of what the rank and file could actually use. Most of us are wanting strenuously for something. A rule that would cause the arrest of a man in this situation would be merciful. A compulsory labor system that would involve regulation of hours, medical treatment, restoration of health, restoration of courage, would soon put an end to the man who is “down and out.” He would of course be down and out to the extent that he had fallen into the clutches of this machine, but he would at least be on the wheel that might bring him back or destroy him utterly. It is of no use to say that life cannot do anything for the inefficient. It can. It does. And the haphazard must, and in the main does, give way to the well-organized. And the injured man need not be allowed to bleed to death. If a man is hurt accidentally a hospital wagon comes quickly. If he is broken in spirit, moneyless, afraid, nothing is done. Yet he is in far greater need of the hospital wagon than the other. The treatment should be different, that is all. [Illustration] OUR RED SLAYER