SYMBOLS
On a street corner in Toledo, at the same time, are reminders of one of the great successes and two of the conspicuous failures of our modern civilization. At Madison Avenue and Ontario Street are a Public Library, a captured German cannon, and the State City Employment Office. All winter a long line of unemployed men have stood, patient but almost hopeless, waiting for a chance to work, so that they may provide for their families. Even the Old Testament made the sweat of the brow a title to bread. When Captain John Smith, in our own early beginnings at Jamestown in 1609, ruled that among the colonists in his little band "he that will not work shall not eat," each man had but to choose to work, and the work was at hand. It was left for the complexity of our modern industrial civilization periodically to deny the opportunity to work.
The German cannon, with its fading camouflage designs of green, yellow and white, speaks to those who have ears to hear of the failure of brotherhood. There are many who will contest that the cannon is a symbol not of failure, but of victory; but the substitution of force for law, of hatred for sympathy, anywhere on the whole earth, is always a failure for all of the race, a turning backward instead of a struggling forward. The Library stands as a salve to our consciences and our discouragement about ourselves; it, at least, testifies to our love for higher things, and our wish to have all men share in them as freely as possible. A Public Library, a German cannon, and a line of unemployed: the measure of our heights and our depths!
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