I was brought up on a farm, and I still remember that not much farming was done in winter. The great demand for extra help comes in mid-summer, when the crops are harvested. During six or eight weeks there is a demand from the farms for more help than they can get. But what man who has a family in the tenements of New York or Chicago can afford to pay his railroad fare to Iowa, Nebraska, or even Ohio, to get six weeks’ work? In the first place, they have not the money with which to pay their fare. These men live from hand to mouth in the city, running in debt during the week, and paying their debt with the wages they receive Saturday night. If their fares were advanced by the farmers who wanted to hire them they would have little or nothing left from what they might earn on the farms, and, in the meantime, their families in the cities would be starving. Furthermore, farm-work is a trade of which these city workers know nothing. They could learn the trade of farming, of course, but they could not learn it in six weeks. At any rate, in panic times there are more than 5,000,000 out of work in this country, and in no conceivable circumstances is it possible that any considerable part of this number could find work upon the farms even six weeks of the year. The fact is that the conditions of modern industrial life are so hard that an increasing number of unorganized workers are barely able to live, even when they work. The constantly increasing cost of living, brought about by the trusts through their control of markets and prices, robs these men to the limit, and they have no labor unions to increase their wages. Still, they do not refuse to work, even for a bare, miserable living. On the contrary, they are eager to work. So are the great bulk of the unemployed eager to work for a miserable living. If, under these horrible conditions, men are willing to work, what reason have we to suppose that any great number would refuse to work under a Socialist government for compensation that would enable each of them to live as well as the $5,000–a-year man now lives? Gentlemen who want to worry about this may worry about it. Socialists are not worrying. If, under Socialism, a few dyed-in-the-wool loafers should appear, Socialists are prepared to deal with them. They do not propose to cease their attempts to rid the world of poverty, merely because of the possibility of the appearance of an occasional loafer. CHAPTER V HOW THE PEOPLE MAY ACQUIRE THE TRUSTS Most men are not interested in private profits, because they don’t get any. Profits are only for capitalists, and the number of capitalists bears but an insignificant proportion to the whole number of people. Most men are wage-workers, of one sort or another, or small farmers.