How shall a child of the slums, ill-fed in body and mind, brought up in the industrial and moral degradation of low city life, without a chance of learning how to use hands or head, and to acquire habits of steady industry, become an efficient workman?
The conditions under which they grow up to manhood and womanhood preclude the possibility of efficiency.

It is the bitterest portion of the lot of the poor that they are deprived of the opportunity of learning to work well.

To taunt them with their incapacity, and to regard it as the cause of poverty, is nothing else than a piece of blind insolence.

Here and there an individual may be to blame for neglected opportunities; but the "poor" as a class have no more chance under present conditions of acquiring "efficiency" than of attaining to refined artistic taste, or the culminating Christian virtue of holiness.

Inefficiency is one of the worst and most degrading aspects of poverty; but to regard it as the leading cause is an error fatal to a true understanding of the problem.
We now see why it is impossible to seriously entertain the claim of Co- operative Production as a direct remedy for poverty.