Social ladder

“ But it would be the weakest of euphuisms to affect ignorance of the social position which he occupies, and which, not to increase the misery of his position, is indubitably 'at the bottom of the ladder.' But that which is at the bottom of the ladder may seriously affect its position and standing. ”

“ Popular tradition tries to make us glow with the belief that this world is a ladder up which virtue and industry will automatically ascend. But unfortunately the ladder of opportunity rarely reaches down so far. The lowest rung is beyond their reach. The gap between it and the ground is often too great even for initiative and character to bridge. The “employed minors fourteen to sixteen years of age” become the nucleus for that [Pg 208] partly employed, sodden and anemic mass of drifters which drags down labor everywhere and clogs social progress. ”

“ In such a state of social organization, we find the utmost and freshest productive activity at every round of the great ladder. Those at the bottom are straining every nerve to rise, and those higher up, [pg 238] not to fall below. ”

“ His voice droned on, speaking as if the subject were a lesson he had learned by rote. "Many times, man's social and political organization has painfully climbed the ladder toward a workable, civilized system, but always it has slipped and fallen back. ”

“ Consider how by a thousand actions and interactions the members of every community are linked together, and how in the present condition of things even the fortunate few who stand upon the apex of the social pyramid must suffer, though they know it not, from the want, ignorance, and degradation that are underneath. Consider these things and then say whether the change I propose would not be for the benefit of every one—even the greatest land holder? ”

“ To what extent do children follow the vocations of their parents and why? To what extent do individuals move from one class to another, and how does this fact modify the character of class relationships? News and the mobility of the social group.—The division of labor, in making individual success dependent upon concentration upon a special task, has had the effect of increasing the interdependence of the different vocations. A social organization is thus created in which the individual becomes increasingly dependent upon the community of which he is an indivisible part. ”

“ The aimless parading of our streets by the sons and daughters of the working and lower middle classes in their leisure time, the rough horseplay of the youth of the lowest classes, are due in large measure to the fact that during the school period they have not been habituated to take part with their fellows in any form of organised activity, have never realised what a corporate life means, and as a consequence are devoid of any social interests. ”

“ If you can once see that a working majority is obtained for the handsome passions, for the feelings that draw us together, rather than for the feelings that separate us, then you have laid the foundation of a community and a free government and, therefore, if you can do nothing else in the community center than draw men together so that they will have common feeling, you will have set forward the cause of civilization and the cause of human freedom. ”

“ So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. This imposing edifice of society above my head holds no delight for me. It is the foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to labor, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, [739] idealists, and class-conscious workingmen, getting a solid pry now and again and setting the whole edifice rocking. ”

“ I, too, realize that the striving in certain quarters is no longer for home and love and happy times, but for something new, even if it is merely for the sake of change, and that this infection of social unrest is quickly spreading downward from the Bluffs, touching the surface of our little community, if not yet troubling its depths. ”

“ Classes for study and recreation are organized right along. The People's University Extension Society invades the home, the nursery, the kindergarten, the club, wherever it can, with help and counsel to mothers with little children, to young men and to old. In (p. 382) a hundred ways those who but yesterday neither knew nor cared how the other half lived are reaching out and touching the people's life. The social settlements labor unceasingly, and where there was one a dozen years ago there are forty. ”

“ Its aim, in fact, was to end this isolation.
But the community from which the worker is isolated is a community of quite a different nature from and of quite other dimensions than the political community. This community, from which his own labour separates him, is life itself, physical and intellectual life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, the human community. ”

“ By this method we discover, for example, as such forms, superiority and inferiority, the erection of hierarchies, competition, division of labor, imitation, representation, and countless other types of human socialization. Only after all their separate forms, from their most primitive to their most developed types, have been inductively determined and psychologically interpreted, can we gradually solve the riddle: “What is society in its essence?” For society is surely not a structure so unitary that a single exhaustive definition is possible. ”

“ Our problem is to recreate the home, the setting of that social group of man, woman and child, which we call the family, and which is the natural nucleus of the commonwealth, and the moral gymnasium where the young should best learn the arts of fellowship. ”

“ The value of the presence of visiting social specialists is in inverse proportion to the degree to which the socialization of a community has advanced. The practical conclusion is clearly that self-dependence of a community in adversity is furthered by the socialization of the existing institutions. ”

“ Soon the cheerful living room, so unlike the urbanized parlors of the neighborhood, became a social center for the young folks, and music and good pictures and the joyous life developed undreamed of social resources in the community, hitherto latent but unexpressed. ”

“ Charities, boards of managers, missions, hospitals, news-rooms, and lodging-houses for the illiterate and the homeless—these are not sufficient, even with balls, dancing classes, and teas, for the superfluous energies of this restless, improving generation; there must be also radical clubs, reading classes, study classes, ethical, historical, scientific, literary lectures, the reading of papers by ladies of distinction and gentlemen of special attainments—an unremitting pursuit of culture and information. Curiosity is awake. The extreme of social refinement and a mild Bohemianism almost touch. ”

“ The fact that each of the boys was poor and obliged to work for a living, and that each, also, was a factory boy, was enough to cause their sympathies to run together. It is natural for the rich to seek the society of the rich, and for the poor to seek the society of the poor, because their sympathies blend together. Hence, we generally find in communities that the rich and poor are usually separated, in some measure, by social barriers. ”

“ She has caught the spirit of the social age. This spirit after all means only that the community is just a family on a larger scale, and the interests of each member are interwoven with those of all. But merely to catch the spirit will not suffice. It must be cherished through an inevitable period of reaction and passivity, and then carried on still further into the relations of capital and labor, into the realm of socialized recreation and into those multiform spheres of social insurance whither all true social policies lead. ”

“ Regret it as much as we may, neither home nor church is as potent in the development of morality as they once were. Before the dominance of the factory system the boy or girl who participated in the activities of the home gained in appreciation of necessity for coöperation and in understanding of his responsibility to the group in a way that is denied the modern child. To be a party to those industries through which food was secured, clothing obtained, and shelter provided meant the exercise of all of the social virtues. ”

“ In both the facility of moving from place to place, and finding a distant home, tends to dissolve the closeness of civic and family life, and to make the individual rather than the family or the city the unit of social life. ”

“ In all grades of society there are individuals who resort to all sorts of means to get money and pleasure, and those who are brought up without moral and social training, and who feel an inclination to disregard the interests of others are ready to justify themselves by illegal examples in high life. Given a tenement home, the streets for a playground, the saloon as a social centre, hard, unpleasant, and poorly paid labor, a yellow press, and a prevailing spirit of envy and hatred for the rich, and it is not difficult to manufacture any amount of crime. ”

“ So that, in any case, we should have to have something in the nature of our contemporary "society." All the more do we need [Pg 15] "society" at present, since those ancient institutions, the church and the café, have almost entirely lost the character of real social centers. ”

“ Coming into close touch with artisans and labourers, and being more and more impressed by the hideousness of their modern conditions of life, and by the contrasted mindless luxury of many of the rich, he founded a social democratic league, tersely described as meant "to blow the guts out of everybody". ”

“ Differences of power, education, and wealth are necessary to keep the social machinery moving; but there is a certain lower boundary where helplessness, illiteracy, and poverty do really threaten the true personality. And then the whole significance of social community is lost. One’s neighbour must not be debased nor deprived by outward circumstances of his inner self; he must have at once the means of working for culture and striving for power and possessions. ”

“ The majority are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.
We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who still remain children to them even when they are grown up. ”

“ The origin of these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walk which mark off social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with isolated subject matter, aim, and standard of values. ”

“ And the same widening gulf, due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for, and temptation toward, forming refined habits among the rich, will make that frequent exchange between class and class, that promotion and inter-marriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along the lines of social stratification, less and less frequent.
"So, in the end, you would have above ground the Haves, pursuing health, comfort, and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots; the workers, getting continually adapted to their labor. ”

“ Nor should all the social life center about the young people. The woman's club, the village improvement society, the men's civic league, all have their places. Club life will menace neither the man nor the woman whose first interest is the home; and every man and woman needs the stimulus of contact with other minds.
Sometimes it will happen that the homemaker finds work to be done in the line of community reform. Perhaps the roads are out of repair, or the cemetery is neglected, or the school building insanitary. ”

“ It is said that the upper classes inevitably become effete, and that the lower constitute an inexhaustible reservoir of mental and moral excellences, from which they are and can be indefinitely renewed; and thus the population is always rising in the social scale, a state of affairs which makes for social happiness. ”

“ The rights of property, vested interests of every sort, the family organization, slavery, caste and class, the whole social organization, in fact, represent accommodations, that is to say, limitations of the natural wishes of the individual. These socially inherited accommodations have presumably grown up in the pains and struggles of previous generations, but they have been transmitted to and accepted by succeeding generations as part of the natural, inevitable social order. All of these are forms of control in which competition is limited by status. ”

“ At home they hang on the necks of the industrious; there they might be converted to useful members of the great community, improving the means of the social body, instead of deteriorating its morals, and wasting its resources. ”

“ If in fulfilling this humanly appointed mission of food center, any individual or group of individuals in the home in carrying out this plan lose from overwork or under education an opportunity for the harmonious development of the four divisions of social personality—the vital, the mental, the moral and the social, the home standing as it does midway between the knowledge of what is best for human nature in its development and the finished product or the social individual in society—is a hindrance to human progress. ”