Feed Them in!
An engineer who was having the tender of his locomotive filled with coal in a Michigan town the other day was horrified to see a man's body roll in with the coal. The man proved to be not dead but unconscious. Only an hour before he had been buried in a slide in the coal-pit, and fortunately the coal into which he fell was called for immediately. The man was resuscitated and will recover.
This is not true, however, of many of the millions of unfortunates who are fed into our modern social machinery. Fed into the trades that pay starvation wages. Fed into the sweatshops. Fed into greedy speculations. Fed into grinding toil and hopeless drudgery. Fed into ignorance and obscurity. Fed into superstition and blind hatred and sensuality and intemperance and infidelity.
They roll into our untender "tenders" with the coal. The locomotive of our progress moves swiftly. Feed them in, faster, faster! Sixty, eighty, a hundred miles an hour! Speed it up; who cares, while human fuel is so plentiful and cheap?
The Unsafe Foundation.
A certain builder was erecting a house where it was necessary to drive piles into the sandy soil in order to get a proper foundation for the structure. These piles were all driven in the usual manner, but in one corner a quicksand was encountered into which the piles sunk with only a few blows of the pile-driver, and almost of their own weight. The builder frowned when he learned of it, but told the masons to go ahead with the foundation, "because," said he, "the greater weight of the building comes upon the other piles; it is lightest in that very corner."
So the building was completed, and looked very handsome.
But, alas! that particular corner, though, as the builder said, it carried the least weight of stone, since the edifice was lower there, yet soon came to carry the heaviest weight of contents. An immense safe was loaded upon it, together with massive office furniture. Immediately yawning cracks appeared, and the building began to settle dangerously. The occupants moved out in a panic. The structure was condemned, and it was necessary to tear down that corner and place beneath it, at a very great expense, a new and safe foundation.
Thus it is that weights and stresses shift in our social structure, and the only safety is to see that the whole foundation is strong and true.