PRESTONIA MANN MARTIN

The primary purpose of organized society is to enable everybody to get a living.

Prohibiting Poverty

The American people are complaining of a pitiful lack of leadership. No one offers any program which promises even a return of former good times, much less any that satisfies the people's legitimate demand for a new kind of prosperity, a stabilized prosperity — steady, trustworthy and sound.

We cannot utilize our plenty because we have established a system under which it cannot be utilized unless it can be sold.

What Is a Good Job? It is a job for which the worker is qualified and for which he has been prepared. It is one which will not enslave him for life, but which shall employ him for as long a time as he needs it in order to win his own economic safety for life. It is one which will reward him lavishly — not in wages or in any form of money payments since money is far too unstable a medium for such purposes — but it shall reward him with due amounts of the actual things and services which he requires in the carrying on of his daily existence.

Every human being has the right to live. It is our duty to acknowledge that right by providing for it. In a natural state of society it would take care of itself. As matters are now it must be deliberately provided for.

In the amenities of life our hoydenish young people are pitifully lacking. Nothing but discipline can give poise, firmness, self-confidence, steadiness, control; nothing can be more beneficial to the youth than to be taught promptness, self-mastery, erect carriage, alertness, cleanliness, obedience, respect, loyalty. Our practice of turning out our young people, raw, uncouth, penniless — into a competitive world to scramble fiercely for a living — cannot give them the real discipline in morals and manners which they need. Nothing can atone for this early lack.

The seven basic, essential goods and services, Food, Clothing, Shelter, Transportation, Protection, Tools, and (special) Education.

A capable mother keeps her young people employed and thus out of mischief. She demands from them co-operative helpfulness. She maintains Shelter. She distributes praise and blame. She keeps order. She does not pretend to practice "democracy", the children do not elect their teachers nor determine the methods of family government. Any mother who knows her business is in her home an absolute domestic dictator. It is she who decides what the children shall eat and wear, when they shall get up or go to bed, and go to school, and come home, &c. Her reign extends however, only over the young and her sole object is to fit them to take proper care of themselves later and to make their own way in life

All of the nation's young people of both sexes, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, as a continuation of their public school education, shall be industrially organized to produce, under scientific direction, a sufficiency of the necessary goods and services to constitute a decent livelihood and to distribute these goods and services without buying or selling them, to the entire population. Continuation of their public school education, shall be industrially organized to produce, under scientific direction, a sufficiency of the necessities.

Each person must keep himself or be kept. No one is born with the right to live upon the labor of others. Some claim this right, to be sure, under the sign of the dollar, and will continue, doubtless, to exercise that privilege so long as they are permitted to do so— so long as nobody calls their bluff. None of us is justified in living upon the labor of others without rendering a return IN KIND. This is primary morality and cannot be forever evaded.

The Plan provides economic safety while at the same time retaining a huge measure of economic liberty. The problem has been how to attain safety without losing freedom. A solution would appear to lie in comparatively simple compromise between socialism and individualism by applying the one to Necessaries and the other to Luxuries.

All so-called "higher" education, with the exception of medicine and the technical sciences leading to production, are Luxuries, not Necessaries.

Not a portion of each day but a portion of each life ought to be allotted to essential labor, while the remaining years should be completely dedicated to leisure, appreciation — and a goal.

To work in a treadmill all one's life, to wear oneself to the bone all one's days, is not conducive to the outflowering of genius. If we desire a real crop of great art, great poetry, great thinking, we must provide the proper conditions.

We are sorry for the hungry, enough to give them food, but not sorry enough to tackle the CAUSES which make hunger possible. We are sorry for the unemployed, but not sorry enough to shoulder the job of abolishing unemployment by means of A NEW AND DARING INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM.

It [her revolutionary plan to radically change the economic structure] must be able to accomplish its purposes without resorting to revolution, without violence, without seeking to overturn established political governments, without making any attack or even reflecting in any adverse way upon the Church, or Religion, or the Law, or upon the Family, or Marriage, or Private Property or the accumulation of Wealth in any amounts.

No harm is done by the possession of Luxury by some people if only at the same time EVERYBODY HAS ENOUGH. The wrong incurred by the rich toward the poor lies solely in the fact that while they revel, the poor starve

The love of Luxury grows by what it feeds upon.

To control the means whereby men live is not very different from owning their persons.

It is easy to imagine thousands of unmarried women — and married women too — who should make a practice of working in a shop or a home or a factory or an office perhaps with a group of others, each in turn taking, say, one day per week,

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the power, as an incentive to action, which the love of luxury exercises over the majority of people. The desire for Luxury is almost universal and is constantly expanding. Things that were formerly considered Luxuries are now held to be Necessaries, and this is as it should be. The world is approaching an era when not the pressure of Necessity but the lure of Luxury must be depended upon to keep society moving onward and upward. Let us avoid Puritanical denunciation of Luxury; the Puritans were dead wrong; their drab lives led to stagnation. All of the great periods of history have been periods characterized by Luxury, by art and by the delight in beauty and splendor.

We can already produce Necessaries enough for everybody but we can never produce Luxuries enough; since the desire for them is insatiable.

There seem to be some persons who do not believe in freedom — for others. They fear that if the common people were free then they would not work for us, or obey us, or do as we think they ought to do. They are even called "lazy". Unhappily it is too true that we have many strains that seem to have become entirely exhausted, perhaps because of the over-work or the dissipation, or both, of their forbears. These people are literally "born tired".

Today it is only the rich who are "free". They employ their time wisely or foolishly as they choose. They ask no one's permission and seek no one's advice whether they shall squander their substance in riotous living or devote themselves to good works. What they do with their time is their own affair. In the future such freedom would be open to everybody.