Far more is at stake--the health or sickness of little babies, the education or ignorance of children, virtue or vice in young daughters, honesty or criminality in young sons, the working power of bread-winners, the integrity of families, the provision for old age--in a word, the welfare and happiness or the misery and degradation of the plain people are involved in the cost of living.
To the special interest an unjust rise in the cost of living means simply higher profit, but to those who pay it, that profit is measured in schooling, warm clothing, a reserve to meet emergencies, a fair chance to make the fight for comfort, decency, and right living.
I believe in our form of government and I believe in the Golden Rule.
But we must face the truth that monopoly of the sources of production makes it impossible for vast numbers of men and women to earn a fair living.

Right here the conservation question touches the daily life of the great body of our people, who pay the cost of special privilege.

And the price is heavy.

That price may be the chance to save the boys from the saloons and the corner gang, and the girls from worse, and to make good citizens of them instead of bad; for an appalling proportion of the tragedies of life spring directly from the lack of a little money.
Thousands of daughters of the poor fall into the hands of the white-slave traders because their poverty leaves them without protection.

Thousands of families, as the Pittsburg survey has shown us, lead lives of brutalizing overwork in return for the barest living.