The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-04-04
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
 OF A JOBLESS MAN Spends Life In Looking for
 Employment A SOCIAL CARBUNCLE one of the Unfortunates Suggests that tho Unemployed Be Shot, Hung or EIectrocuted, for the Good of
 Society and Community.

A two page contribution to the April American Magazine, called Looking for a. Job," by Charles W. Wood IS quite an extraordinary little magazine article. The author says the editor, IS an honest though not very capapie working man who has tried his pest TOT the last six months to find a 1op' HIS remarks have to deal with the serious problem of what is to be done with ene 100000 or 100000 of the unempioyeo' He offers the following solution;
 "Now for the solution. It is evident that society must do something 10 "aro of the possible and even propapie re- suits of keeping too many or us oue oi work. To the superficial thinker the simplest method would seem 10 pc 'o shoot. hang or electrocute the uhem- ,loyed. This would never do. Not onlv would 1t involve a tremendous expense. but 1t would practically ruin business throughout the nation: for, nondescripts though we be, we are nev- ertheless. almost indispensable to society.
 'Imprisonment is hardly less objec- tionable It is being tried today in a number of states, but the results are not encouraging. I have several friends in New York state who have been con- victed of looking for a job (vagrancy, I believe, is the legal term) and the re- suit of their incarceration, while it has been fairly satisfactory to the inear- cerated, has been anything but satis- factory to the pub.lc. When man has been locked out all his life, he rather enjoys being locked in; and the sweet security of the jail eventually becomes more attractive than the rigorous hard ships of job.
 Understand I do not question the right of society to kill or imprison us I merely point out the uselessness Of such course. The state owes protec- tion to us citizens, but no one but fool would accuse us of citizenship. We may have votes, but we don't know what they mean, and not having the right to work 1t follows that we have not even the right to live. Crazy sen timentalists persist in saying that the man who wants clothes and is willing to make them should be allowed the opportunity, that he who wants food and is willing to raise is should have access to the land and that even he who wants luxuries and Is willing to manufacture thehm should have access to the machin- cry But these fools ignore the fundat mental rlSHlS OI prOpeIly. we hhoW that is far better that a few million or us should starve along looking for job than that any citizens rights should be impaired Granting us the right to ere ate wealth would be the next thing to giving us the wealth which we create, and we workingmen, employed and un- employed, are opposed to that Unless one set of people close the manufactur- ing and an entirely different set the pos sessng, none of us could become million aires and, deprived of that expectation, what would our lives amount to? Though we are not citizens now, we all have to enjoy full citizenship sometime and surely this would be a sorry honor, if we could not see, by way of contrast, our half-starved subjects looking for a job. It stands to reason that any insane the ory which proposes equal opportunities for all will not solve the problem of the jobless. President Eliot of Harvard has also demonstrated that socialism is incompatible with human nature, al- though his demonstration was neither so thorough nor so simple as my own.