CHAPTER VII
WORK AS A VITAL PART OF PATRIOTISM
Gurowski asked, "Where is the bog? I wish to earn money. I wish to dig peat." "Oh, no, sir, you cannot do such degrading work." "I cannot be degraded. I am Gurowski."—Emerson's Journals.
SOMETHING has been said of the estimation in which work and working for a living, are held in our country.
In an illuminating sermon, Dr. Lyman Abbott once treated of this subject. It was on the Fourth of July, and he began by saying that the most important result of the Civil War, as he viewed it, was one that he had never heard mentioned. Having thus enlisted the keenest attention of his hearers, he continued in nearly these words:
"Before the Civil War, the man who worked with his hands was despised by the leading element in the South. Supplied with an army of slaves to wait upon him, the average planter was spared the necessity of exertion. He hunted in the season, raced sometimes and sometimes played an athletic game; but he held the theory, broadly speaking, that no man could be a gentleman (as most foreigners believe also) who engages in trade or pursues any mechanical occupation.
"The war changed all that. Many of the richest planters had to go to work. Some of them had even to enter menial servitude in order to earn bread for their families. Then they found out that it was possible to preserve their scholarship, their refinement and their gentle manners, though they worked hard every day. It was an epochal discovery.
"From that time, the dignity of labor was established in the South, as the Pilgrim Fathers had long before established it in New England, and as it must eventually be established throughout the world, if the world is ever to rise to the full glory of the democratic ideal."
The chief, and almost the only argument of the advocates of Child Labor in our fields and factories, is that the children thus become early used to work,—a habit which is productive of the best results in later life.
Carlyle's great essays upon work have inspired thousands; and in Professor Carl Hilty's wonderful volume called "Happiness," there is an essay on "Work," which every parent should read. He shows how laziness,—the inherent aversion to work,—has been a chief obstacle to progress in all ages; how hard labor was so universally relegated to slaves during early times that even to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, any social system was unthinkable, which did not include a slave class.
One of Professor's Hilty's incidental remarks is worth mentioning. He speaks of the many excellent women who observe scrupulously the injunction in the Fourth Commandment to keep the Sabbath Day holy; but who seem to fail to observe the opening sentence of the commandment, "Six days shalt thou labor"; often apparently thinking that one day out of the seven, or even none at all, is enough for that purpose. He feels that the progress of the world depends upon the combined and strenuous labor of every living man and woman for six days out of the seven,—with only occasional vacations!
We are all probably agreed that every citizen should know how to support himself.
One of our truant officers went to a poor home to find out why a boy who lived there had been absent from school for several days. The mother reported that the father was in the hospital, and that her only support was the small pay which this boy received for holding horses, doing errands for the corner grocer, and so on.
The teapot stood on the stove, and the officer said, "But your boy will grow up ignorant if you keep him out of school like this. Don't you want him to know about tea,—where it grows and how it is prepared for the market?"
"Oh," responded the poor woman, with a practical common sense which disconcerted her hearer, "I'd a dale rather he should know how to airn a pound of it."
And in her desperate circumstances, it was far more necessary that he should.
But in well-to-do households, where there is not much work that a child can do, especially in the city, how can he be trained up in habits of industry?
This is a problem which, as we have said, confronts thousands of conscientious mothers, who believe profoundly in Mrs. Browning's pregnant lines:
"Get work! Get work! Be sure
That it is better than anything you work to get."
Country children can gather the eggs, cut feed for the animals, often have a pet lamb, chickens, heifers or colts of their own to care for. There is little difficulty in finding "chores" for them to do. But the city boy and girl are not so fortunately situated.
All that can be done for them is to devise errands, and to place upon them as much responsibility for small duties about the house, as you think they can bear. They should spend as much time as possible in the open air, playing in their own yard or, under close watch, in the street,—the playground of most city children.
Every means that can be thought of should be used to make them despise the idea of idleness, and to love work.
A distinguished professor in one of our great universities taught his classes that work was one of the cardinal evils, and that a prime endeavor of life should be to get along with as little work as possible.
A mother of one of his pupils, who had brought her son up to believe that work was noble and honorable, and that it ranked with the four gospels as a means of salvation from sin, has never forgiven that professor. He overturned in the mind of her son the ideal of the glory of work, which she had so painstakingly erected there, and it has never been fully re-established. No such man as that teacher should ever be given a position upon a college faculty.
When one reads of the childhood of the vast majority of our distinguished men it seems chimerical to hope that children brought up in comfort, with plenty to eat and to wear, should ever attain to high positions. Most of our great men appear to have struggled through seas of adversity, in order to get an education and a foothold in the world of literature or art or politics or finance. We recognize that it was the self-reliance and the capacity for hard work thus developed, which brought them success. We know that it is a truism that poverty is the mother of muscle and of invention. Many wealthy parents have tried to supply this great motive by depriving their children of luxuries, and making them work their way through college, or "begin at the bottom" of some business. This has sometimes, but not often, resulted well; for, after all, artificial poverty is only a blind, and the child has ever the underlying consciousness that it is, and that there is no real need that he should much exert himself.
A lady who conducted a subscription class of society women in their own beautiful parlors, testified that their mental inertia was lamentable, and that the only two in her class of fifty, who really seemed to have any capacity for keen thought, were women who worked for a living. They had to make their minds nimble and bright in order to keep themselves afloat.
In Professor Drummond's remarkable book, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," there is a striking illustration of the deteriorating effect of disuse upon organs, in the highly organized crab, which, when it finds a rich feeding-ground, attaches itself to some convenient rock, loses one by one its feelers and tentacles and soon becomes a simple sac, fit only to suck up nourishment.
Many of the absurd opinions and nearly all of the sins of the so-called "society" people can be laid to idleness. The mind, seldom used to its capacity, becomes dull and unable to reason, and the moral nature loses its strength of conviction. Nothing is worse for our country than the increase of our idle classes. Its salvation is the slogan that every man and woman should work and earn at least a living.
Our "leisure women" are realizing their plight, and most of them are entering actively into our great philanthropic and civic organizations. The war has given them a splendid opportunity and it is a good sign for our nation that so many of them have seized it. The idle woman, whom George Meredith calls, "that baggage which has so hindered the march of civilization," is coming to realize her responsibility as a citizen of a great democratic nation. The leisure man among us is so rare that he is an almost negligible quantity, for which we may well be thankful. If we can get the child of America started well in the ways of industry, the man is safe; for one who has experienced the transporting pleasure of achievement, can scarcely help wanting more of it.
"The phrase, 'economy of effort,' so dear to Froebel's followers, had little meaning for Dr. William James," says Agnes Repplier. "He asserts that effort is oxygen to the lungs of youth, and that a noble, generous rivalry is the spur of action and the impelling force of civilization."
It is certainly the "cue" of every patriot who loves his country.
The joy of work is well described by Cleveland Moffett in the article which has been mentioned. He says: "However disagreeable work may be, life without work is even more disagreeable. All who have tried it, no matter how rich they are, agree that enforced idleness ranks among the most cruel of tortures. Men easily die of it, as doctors know, who every day order broken-down neurasthenics in their middle fifties, back into the business or professional harness they have foolishly retired from."
The field of work for those women who are obliged or prefer to support themselves, is broadening hopefully. President Woolley of Mount Holyoke tells of seven of her recent graduates who took part lately in a symposium at the college, all of whom were engaged in paying work, but no one of whom was teaching, though that has hitherto been the main dependence of the wage-earning girl.
One of these young women was a physician; the others were respectively: a lawyer; an interior decorator; an editor of the children's department of a well-known periodical; a county agent in New York State; a member of the staff of the Children's Bureau at Washington; and the Secretary of the American Nurses' Association.
Such incidents make us confident that the varied talents of our bright girls will soon find as wide a scope as that enjoyed by our boys.
And it cannot be too strongly emphasized that regular daily work in early life is invaluable in establishing habits of industry.
A common expression used to be: "He has good habits," or "He has bad habits." We do not hear it so often nowadays, but the words are full of meaning. As a man's habits are, so is he.
"Could the young but realize," says Mr. Moffett, "how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."
It is then that we mothers must mold them into the workers that we want them to be, and we must use the patriotic motive to quicken their love of industry. In certain states this motive is strengthened by laws compelling idle men to work.
Robert Gair is the founder of what is now the greatest "paper-products" business in this country, and probably in the world. It is located in the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City. There Mr. Gair, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, made an address to his employees, a portion of which, as reported in the Brooklyn Eagle, was as follows:
"No permanent achievement, whatever its form may be, appears to be possible without stress of labor. Nothing has come to me without persistent effort of the head and of the hand. Hard labor will win what we want, if the laws of nature are obeyed. Self-coddling and the fear of living strenuously, enfeeble character and result in half-successes. Hard labor has no penalties. It is the loss of hardihood through careless living that brings penalties. Do the one thing before you with your whole heart and soul. Do not worry about what has gone by, nor what lies ahead, but rivet your mind and energies on the thing to be done now. Self-indulgence and late hours produce leaden hands and a listless brain, robbing your work of 'punch.'"
Mr. Gair cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln. He enlisted early in the Civil War and saw hard service. Less than two hundred of the original 1,087 of his regiment remained to be mustered out at the close of the war.
Surely his wise and uncompromising words indicate one of the most necessary ways in which our young people, who desire to show how much they love their country and wish to promote her glory, can contribute to it.