Thus we are brought round again to the one central point in the problem of poverty, the existence of an excessive supply of cheap labour.
Sec.5.The False Dilemma which impedes Progress .-- There are those who seek to retard all social progress by a false and mischievous dilemma which takes the following shape.

No radical improvement in industrial organization, no work of social reconstruction, can be of any real avail unless it is preceded by such moral and intellectual improvement in the condition of the mass of workers as shall render the new machinery effective; unless the change in human nature comes first, a change in external conditions will be useless.

On the other hand, it is evident that no moral or intellectual education can be brought effectively to bear upon the mass of human beings, whose whole energies are necessarily absorbed by the effort to secure the means of bare physical support.
Thus it is made to appear as if industrial and moral progress must each precede the other, a thing which is impossible.

Those who urge that the two forms of improvement must proceed _pari passu, _do not precisely understand what they propose.
The falsehood of the above dilemma consists in the assumption that industrial reformers wish to proceed by a sudden leap from an old industrial order to a new one.

Such sudden movements are not in accordance with the gradual growth which nature insists upon as the condition of wise change.