“_Of all the cankers of human happiness none corrodes with so silent yet so baneful an influence, as indolence. Body and mind both unemployed, our being becomes a burthen, and every object about us loathsome, even the dearest. Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical. Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body, and cheerfulness of mind; all these make us precious to our friends. It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterwards. The fortune of our lives, therefore, depends on employing well the short period of youth._” --THOMAS JEFFERSON. _Chapter Eight_ FIGHTING FOR LIFE The very first direct result of the growing consciousness of conditions throughout the country is a sudden growth in the volume of money devoted to charity, and a sudden and quite extraordinary increase in the personal interest shown by the wealthy in the matter of reform. It is perfectly natural that this should be so. In every nation, in all periods of history, it has been true. Sometimes this impulse toward charity and reform, which grows out of real personal study of the problems of poverty, goes very far toward saving a nation from ruin. No student of political economy can afford to ignore this impulse toward charity, and sweep it away as most thoughtless writers to-day are inclined to sweep it away, as though it were merely a conscious effort on the part of the rich to buy their way into the kingdom of heaven, to escape the accusing finger of the poor, and to avoid the payment of a debt to humanity long overdue. One must recall that, in the twenty years from 1742 to 1762, an impulse toward charity, based really on conditions very similar in their nature to our own, went far toward saving the nation of England from almost certain ruin. The rich at that time had forsaken religion, had plunged into immorality far deeper and far more general than the wealthy classes in the United States to-day, and come to sneer at purity and fidelity to the marriage vow, and openly boasted of their profligacy. The poor, on the other hand, had sunk to depths of ignorance and brutality absolutely unknown in this land of ours. The tremendous growth of manufacturing towns was the cause that widened the rift between these two classes. It was, in fact, exactly our phenomenon, differing only in degree. Society had come to live in deadly fear of the masses, so that the statute books of the land were filled with laws dealing death upon the poor for the most trivial of offences. It was a capital crime to cut down a cherry-tree; it was a capital crime to steal.