But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind. As it
was blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand.
Well, then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms
sharp and unmistakable. In the first place, consider the caveman.
He was a very simple creature. His head slanted back like an orang-
outang's, and he had but little more intelligence. He lived in a
hostile environment, the prey of all manner of fierce life. He had
no inventions nor artifices. His natural efficiency for food-getting
was, say, 1. He did not even till the soil. With his natural
efficiency of 1, he fought off his carnivorous enemies and got
himself food and shelter. He must have done all this, else he would
not have multiplied and spread over the earth and sent his progeny
down, generation by generation, to become even you and me.

The caveman, with his natural efficiency of 1, got enough to eat most
of the time, and no caveman went hungry all the time. Also, he lived
a healthy, open-air life, loafed and rested himself, and found plenty
of time in which to exercise his imagination and invent gods. That
is to say, he did not have to work all his waking moments in order to
get enough to eat. The child of the caveman (and this is true of the
children of all savage peoples) had a childhood, and by that is meant
a happy childhood of play and development.

And now, how fares modern man? Consider the United States, the most
prosperous and most enlightened country of the world. In the United
States there are 10,000,000 people living in poverty. By poverty is
meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and
adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be
maintained. In the United States there are 10,000,000 people who