If the upper strata of low-class workers are enabled to organize, and, what is more difficult, to protect themselves against incursions of outsiders, the position of the lower strata will become even more hopeless and helpless.

If one by one all the avenues of regular low-skilled labour are closed by securing a practical monopoly of this and that work for the members of a Union, the superfluous body of labourers will be driven more and more to depend on irregular jobs, and forced more and more into concentrated masses of city dwellers, will present an ever-growing difficulty and danger to national order and national health.
Consideration of the general progress of the working-classes has no force to set aside this problem.

It seems not unlikely that we are entering on a new phase of the poverty question.

The upper strata of low-skilled labour are learning to organize.

If they succeed in forming and maintaining strong Unions, that is to say, in lifting themselves from the chaotic struggle of an earlier industrial epoch, so as to get fairly on the road of modern industrial progress, the condition of those left behind will press the illogicality of our present national economy upon us with a dramatic force which will be more convincing than logic, for it will appeal to a growing national sentiment of pity and humanity which will take no denial, and will find itself driven for the first time to a serious recognition of poverty as a national, industrial disease, requiring a national, industrial remedy.
The great problem of poverty thus resides in the conditions of the low- skilled workman.