CHAPTER II A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT
Highland Falls, N. Y.,
Monday, August 3, 1891.
At three o'clock on Saturday afternoon I decided to quit work on the old Academic building. I went up to the boss and told him of my intention, as I had seen other men do, and was ordered into the office; there, without a moment's delay, the timekeeper's books were consulted, and No. 6 was paid the five dollars and eighty-five cents which were due him. Five dollars are gone to Mrs. Flaherty for board; seventy-five cents more will be owing to her to-morrow morning for another day, and then I shall set out on the road with ten cents in my pocket.
I had calculated upon a balance far in excess of that; for when I went to work on Tuesday, five full working-days were before me, and, at a wage of one dollar and sixty cents, they were to yield an income of eight dollars. My reckoning left out the chance of rain. For three days passing showers drove us to cover, and the "called time" was as closely noted by the boss as it is by the referee in a foot-ball game; only we were given no chance to make it up.
Mrs. Flaherty's home has a real hold upon my affections. It is one in my mind with the blessed interludes of rest which were brief transitions from one æon of work to another. My acquaintance with the household covers a period of incalculable time. Mrs. Flaherty wears toward me now a motherly air of possession; and she wrinkles her brows in perplexed protest when I tell her that I am going away in the morning, with no knowledge of where I shall find another place; and she wipes her mouth with the corner of her apron, and tells me, with increasing emphasis, that I'd better stay by my job, and let her care for me decently, and not go wandering about the country, and, as likely as not, come to harm.
Her husband is a painter, a little round man with red hair and high spirits, who is a well-preserved veteran of the Civil War, and very fond of telling you of his life as a "recruitie."
Minnie is their daughter. She inherits her father's hair, and gives promise of his rotundity. But just now Minnie is fifteen, and the world is a very interesting and exciting place. She took her first communion last Easter, and still wears her confirmation dress on Sundays, and is really pretty in a blushing effort to look unconscious when Charlie McCarthy calls.
Charles appears regularly on Sunday afternoons, I gather. He is a driver for an ice-dealer, is not much older than Minnie, and is very proud of a light-gray suit and a pair of highly polished brown boots.
Tom is Minnie's only brother. He is a stoker on a river-boat, and can spend only his Sundays at home. Tom is a little past his majority, and takes himself very seriously as a man. He tells you frankly that he is earning "big money," and is anxious that you shall not escape the knowledge that he is a libertine.
The child that he is came comically to the surface last night, with no least regard for the newly found dignity of manhood. Tom shares one of the beds in my room, and in the middle of the night he came bounding to the floor in a nightmare, and running to the door began pounding it with both hands, and screaming, "Papa! Papa!" like a child in a paroxysm of fear. He soon woke himself, and then he slunk into bed and was surly with us as we crowded about him, eager to know the cause of this violent awaking.
Jerry and Pete and Jim and Tom Wilson and I are the boarders. Wilson's is the only surname that I know. Surnames are little in use on this level of society; they smack of a certain formality like that which attaches to Sunday clothes. We were all sitting on the porch after supper on my first evening, and I knew that the men were taking my measure. Jerry broke the silence with an abrupt inquiry after my name. I responded with my surname. Jerry took his pipe from his mouth, and turned to me with some warmth: "That's not what I want to know. What's your first name? What's a man to call you?" "Oh, call me John," I said, with sudden inspiration, and I have passed as "John" accordingly.
Wilson and I worked together at unskilled labor, and we have a bed in common; and it was during a night of fearful heat, when neither of us could sleep, that Wilson, in a burst of confidence, told me his full name.
I had noticed him as a new-comer on the works on Wednesday morning. He accepted the job with alacrity, and, in spite of evident physical weakness, he went to work with feverish energy. At noon hour we shared a dinner, and he told me that he had slept in the open for three nights running, and had had nothing to eat since the previous noon. I referred him to Mrs. Flaherty, and at supper I found him at a place at her table.
It was that night that he gave me his confidence. Two years ago he came to America from the north of Ireland. From the first he had found it hard to get work, and he had never kept a job long. This was chiefly due, he said, to his having been brought up to the work in the linen-mills, and to the difficulty that he found in adapting himself to any other. And now his narrative suddenly glowed with active personal interest, for, with each succeeding sentence about his apprenticeship in Lurgan, there rose into clearer memory visions of a charming fortnight once spent at the home of the owners of the mill.
I have set for myself to-day the task of describing the past week of actual service in the ranks of the industrial army. My pen runs wide of the subject, and I have to force it to the retrospect. There were five working-days of nine hours and a quarter each, less the "called time" eaten out by the rain. Never was there clearer proof of the pure relativity of time measured by an artificial standard. Hours had no meaning; there were simply ages of physical torture, and short intervals when the physical reaction was an ecstasy.
We were called at six on Tuesday morning; and at twenty minutes to seven we had breakfasted, and were ready to start for the works, each with his dinner folded in a piece of newspaper. Passing from our side street to the road which leads to the Post, we were at once merged in a throng of workingmen moving in our direction.
I was suddenly aware of a novel impression of individuality. Gangs of workingmen, as I recalled them, were uniform effects in earth-stained jeans and rugged countenances, rough with a varying growth of stubborn beard. To have distinguished among them would have seemed like distinguishing among a crowd of Chinese. Now individuality began to appear in its vital separateness, and to awaken the sense of infinite individual sensation, from which we instinctively shrink as we do from the thought of unbroken continuity of consciousness.
But my eyes were growing sensitive to other differences, certainly to the broad distinction between skilled and unskilled workmen. Many orders of labor were represented—masons and carpenters and bricklayers and plasterers, besides unskilled laborers. An evident superiority in intelligence, accompanied by a certain indefinable superiority in dress, was the general mark of skilled labor. And then the class of unskilled workers was noticeably heterogeneous in composition, while many of the other class were plainly of American birth.
It is a mile from Highland Falls to West Point, and we moved briskly. There was little conversation among the men. Most of them had taken off their coats, and with these over their arms and their dinner-pails in hand, they walked in silence, with their eyes on the road. The morning was sultry and overhung with heavy clouds, full of the promise of rain. A forest lines much of the road, and from the overhanging boughs fell great drops of dew, dotting the surface of soft dust. The wayside weeds and bushes were gray with a coating of dust, and seemed to cry out in the still, hot air for the suspended rain.
The old Academic building stood near to the Mess Hall at the southern end of the Post. In process of removal one wing had been blown up by dynamite, I was told, and now its site lay deep in heaps of débris. It was here that one gang of laborers was employed, and it was with them that the boss had instantly given me a job upon my application on the previous morning.
There were about sixty men in the company. Most of them stood grouped among the ruins, ready to begin work on the hour. I had but to follow their example. I hung my coat, with my dinner in one pocket, on a neighboring fence, and brought a shovel from the tool-house, and joined the other men. We stood silent, like a company at attention. The teamsters drove up with their carts, and the bosses counted them. In another moment the head boss, who had been keeping his eye on his watch, shut the case with a sharp metallic click, and shouted "Turn out!" in stentorian tones.
The effect was magical. The scene changed on the instant from one of quiet to one of noisy activity. Men were loosening the ruined mass with their picks, and urging their crow-bars between the blocks of stone, and shovelling the finer refuse into the carts, and loading the coarser fragments with their hands. The gang-boss, mounted upon a section of wall, began to direct the work before him. A cart had been driven among the ruins, and he called three of us to load it with the jagged masonry that lay heaped about it. It was too coarse to be handled with shovels, and we went at it with our hands. They were soon bleeding from contact with the sharp edges of rock; but the dust acted as a styptic and helped vastly in the hardening process. When the cart was loaded, another took its place, and then a third and a fourth.
In a harsh, resonant voice the boss was shouting his orders over our heads, to the farthermost portion of the works. His short, thickset, muscular figure seemed rooted to the masonry on which he stood. The mingled shrewdness and brute strength of his hard face marked him as a product of natural selection for the place that he filled. His restless gray eyes were everywhere at once, and his whole personality was tense with a compelling physical energy. If the work slackened in any portion of the ruins, his voice took on a vibrant quality as he raised it to the shout of "Now, boys, at it there!" and then a lash of stinging oaths. You could feel a quickening of muscular force among the men, like the show of eager industry in a section of a school-room that has fallen suddenly under the master's questioning eye.
In the dust which rose from the débris I picked up a mass of heavy plaster, and, before detecting my mistake, I tossed it into the cart. But the boss had seen the action, and instantly noticed the error, and now all his attention was directed upon me. In short, incisive sentences, ringing with malediction, he cursed me for an ignoramus and threatened me with discharge. I could feel the amused side-glances of the men, and could hear their muffled laughter.
At last all the carts were loaded and driven away, and until their return, some of us were set at assorting the débris—throwing the splintered laths and bricks and fragments of stone and plaster into separate heaps. The work compelled a stooping posture, and the pain of lacerated fingers was as nothing compared with the agony of muscles cramped and forced to unaccustomed use.
A business-like young fellow, with the air of a clerk, now began to move among the men, and they showed the keenest interest in his approach. I heard them speak of him as the "timekeeper," but I had no knowledge of such a functionary, and I wondered whether he had any business with me. He hailed me with a brisk "What is your number?" I looked at him in surprise. "He's a new hand," shouted the boss from his elevation. "What's your name?" asked the timekeeper, as he turned a page in his book. I told him, and when he had written it he drew from his pocket a brass disk, upon which was stamped the number six, and this he told me to wear, suspended by its string, and to show it to him as often as he made his rounds.
The cartmen had reappeared and received their loads, and had again driven off, in long procession, in the direction of Highland Falls. We went back to the varied torture of assorting. But the pain was not purely physical. The work was too mechanical to require close attention, and yet too exhausting to admit of mental effort. I did not know how to prevent my mind from preying upon itself.
At last I hit upon a plan which appealed to me. I simply went back in imagination to the familiar country-seat, and followed the morning through a likely course. We met at breakfast, and complained of the discomfort of the sultry day as we discussed our plans, and then we walked over the lawn to the pier. Two cruising sloops, that had waited in the hope of a freshening breeze, now weighed anchor, and under main-sail and top-sail and jib drifted slowly out of the harbor. We watched them in idle curiosity, wondering at the distinctness with which the conversation of the yachtsmen came back to us across the oily placidity of still water, until they seemed almost half way to the spindle, and then we agreed upon a morning ride. We telephoned to the stables, and before we were ready the horses stood restless under the porte-cochère. Step by step I followed our progress along the road that skirts the inlet, and across the crumbling bridge on the turnpike, and under the great, drooping elms which line the village-street in Fairfield, and up the long ascent of the Greenfield Hill to the old church, and then home by the "back road." The dogs came running at us from the stables with short, sharp barks of welcome as we cantered past, and we called to them by name. As we turned by the reservoir, we could see a groom running down the path in order to reach the house before us. Hot from the ride, we passed through the dim mystery of the hall and billiard-room and den, and out upon the veranda, where a breath of air was stirring, and the fountain played softly in its bed of vines and flowers. Louis had returned from market. Our letters lay in order on the settle, and near them, neatly folded, were the morning papers. And now Louis's approach was heralded by the tinkling of ice against the glass of bumpers of cooling drinks, and his bow was accompanied with a polite reminder that luncheon would be served in half an hour.
I had been working with all my strength. Now I looked up at the boss in some hope of a sign of the noon hour. There was none. Painfully I went back to the work. Again I tried to find diversion in this new device. Slowly, with double the needed time for each event, I followed the morning through another imaginary series. Now I was sure that the boss had made a mistake and had lost track of the time, and was working us far into the afternoon. The clouds had thickened, and the growing darkness I was certain was the coming night. Great drops of rain began to fall, but the men paid them no heed. Soon the drops quickened to a shower, and still the men worked on. The moisture from within and without had made us wringing wet when the boss ordered us to quit. We bolted for our coats and dinner-pails, and then huddled in the shelter of the still-standing walls of the ruin. Through one of the great doorways I caught sight of the tower of a neighboring building with a clock in it. It was twenty minutes to nine! In all that eternity since we began to load the first cart, we had been working one hour and forty minutes, and had each earned about twenty-nine cents.
The rain cost us an hour of working-time, and then we went back, and found some relief from the earlier discomfort in the saturation which had thoroughly settled the dust.
In another hour, with no freshening of the air, the clouds faded out of the sky. The sun shone full upon us, and there arose from the heaps of ruin a mist heavy with the smell of damp plaster. But I had my "second wind" at last, and I worked now with the feeling of some reserve of physical strength. It was with surprise that I heard the loud voice of the head boss in a shout of "Time's up!" and almost before I knew what had happened the men were seated on the ground, in the shadows of the walls, eating their dinners.
I opened mine with much curiosity. There were two huge sandwiches, with slices of corned beef between the bread, and a bit of cheese and a piece of apple-pie, very damp and oozing. Among the other men, with my aching back pressed against the wall, I sat and ate my dinner, lingering over the last crumbs like a child with some rare dainty.
At the end of the forty-five minutes allowed to us at noon, there came again, from the head boss, the order to "Turn out." In a moment the scene of the morning was renewed. There was the same alternation between loading the carts and assorting the débris.
We had been but a few minutes at work when the cadets went marching past, on their way to mess. Familiar as most of the men were with the sight, they seized eagerly upon the diversion that it offered. The boss relaxed his vigilance. The work visibly slackened, as we lent ourselves to the fascination of individual motion merged into perfect harmony of collective movement. Conspicuous in the rear was the awkward squad, very hot in its effort to walk erect, and keep its shoulders back and its little fingers on the seams of its trousers. The men laughed merrily at the comical contrast between such grotesquely strenuous efforts at conformity and the ease and strength and grace of the unison which preceded it.
No rain came to give us breathing-space in the afternoon. Hour by hour the relentless work went on. The sun had soon absorbed the last drop of the morning rain, and now the ruins lay burning hot under our feet. The air quivered in the heat reflected from the stone and plaster about us; the fine lime-dust choked our breathing as we shovelled the refuse into the carts. You could hear the muttered oaths of the men, as they swore softly in many tongues at the boss, and cursed him for a brute. But ceaselessly the work went on. We worked as though possessed by a curious numbness that kept us half-unconscious of the straining effort, which had become mechanical, until we were brought to by some spasm of strained muscles.
But five o'clock came at last, and with it, on the second, the loud "Time's up!" of the head boss. You could see men fairly check a tool in its downward stroke, in their eagerness not to exceed the time by an instant. In two minutes the tools were housed and the works deserted, and the men were running like school-boys, with a clatter of dinner-pails, in a competitive scramble for seats in the dump-carts, which were moving toward Highland Falls.
The hindmost were left to walk the mile to their lodgings. I fell in with two old Irishmen, who noticed me with a friendly look, and then went on with their conversation, paying me no further heed. But I felt strangely at home with these old men. Their short, faltering steps exactly suited my own, and I comfortably bent my back to the angle of their stoop, not in an effort to simulate their figures, but because to stand erect cost me exquisite agony.
The men in the carts were soon out of our sight, but the remnant was large and was thoroughly representative. We formed a weird procession, this fragment of a company in the ranks of labor. There were few native-born Americans, one or two perhaps, besides myself; but there were Irish and Scandinavians and Hungarians and Italians and negroes.
A WEIRD PROCESSION, THIS FRAGMENT OF A COMPANY IN THE RANKS OF LABOR
As a physical exertion, walking was not hard after our day's labor. It was a change and a rest, and we must all have felt the soothing refreshment in the breath of cool air which was moving down the river, and in the soft light of the early evening, which brought out in new loveliness the curves of the opposite hills and deepened the shades of blue and green. My own appreciation of all this and more would have been livelier but for two overpowering appetites, which were asserting themselves with unsuspected strength. I was hungry, not with the hunger which comes from a day's shooting, and which whets your appetite to the point of nice discriminations in an epicure's dinner, but with a ravenous hunger which fits you to fight like a beast for your food, and to eat it raw in brutal haste for gratification. But more than hungry, I was thirsty. Cold water had been in abundant supply at the works, and we drank as often and as freely as we chose. But water had long since ceased to satisfy. My mouth and throat were burning with the action of the lime-dust, and the physical craving for something to quench that strange thirst was an almost overmastering passion. I knew of no drink quite strong enough. I have never tasted gin, but I remembered in one of Froude's essays a reference to it as much in use among working-men, and as being seasoned to their taste by a dash of vitriol, and eagerly I longed for that.
Half-way down the road we met some young women in smart dog-carts driving to the sunset parade at the post. In the delicate fabric and color of summer dress they seemed to us the embodiment of the cool of the evening. Suddenly I looked with a keener interest. With her fingers outstretched she was shading her eyes from the horizontal rays of the setting sun, and she did not see us, rather saw through us, as through something transparent, the familiar objects on the roadside. I had seen her last in town at a wedding at St. Thomas's, and fate unkindly sent her up the aisle on the arm of another usher. I laughed aloud, a short, harsh laugh, that escaped me before I was aware, and that had in it so odd a quality that it gave me an uncomfortable feeling of unacquaintance with myself. The two old Irishmen turned inquiring glances at me, and appeared disturbed at my serious look.
My room, when I reached it, was, in spite of wide-opened windows, like Nero's bath at Baiæ. The ceiling and walls glowed with stored-up heat. Jim was there making ready for supper, and I could hear Jerry and Pete in their room in similar preparation.
When I put my hands into the cold water, I could scarcely feel them; but the pain of cleansing grew sharp, and yet, when I had thoroughly washed them, although the fingers felt double their normal size, they were really less swollen, and were far on the way to comfort.
The reaction had set in now, and I could feel it in great, cooling waves of physical well-being. The table was heaped with supper, huge slices of juicy sirloin, and dishes of boiled potatoes and cabbage and beans, from which the steam rose in fragrant clouds. By each plate was a large cup of tea, so strong and hot that it bit like lye, and it soon washed away the burning lime-dust.
We sat down with our coats and waistcoats off. The men were in the best of good-humor, and the conversation ran into friendly talk. They asked me how I liked my job. I thought much better of it by this time, and I tried to wear the air of critical content. They may have had their own notions about my previous experience of manual labor, but certainly they did not obtrude these with any show of suspicion. They accepted me as a working-man on perfectly natural terms. Until Wilson came I was the only unskilled laborer among them, but my different grade was no barrier to our intercourse, and we met and talked with the freedom of men whose experience is innocent of conventional restraints.
Long after supper we sat on the porch, smoking in the twilight. A deep physical comfortableness possessed us. Each mouthful of meat and drink had wrought miraculous healing, and had restored wasted energy in measures that could be felt. My muscles were sore, but the very pain turned to pleasure in the ease of relaxation.
The men were town artisans, skilled laborers, attracted here by the abundance of work. Jerry was a plasterer, and Pete a bricklayer, and Jim a stone-mason. A short, slender figure, a smooth-shaven face with small, sharp, regular features, black hair, and gray eyes, is a sufficient outline of Jerry's personality. His air was that of a cynic, and there was a cynical flavor in his speech, but the sting of it was gone at the sight of his soft gray eyes, full of generous reserve of human kindness.
Pete was a well-set-up young fellow, of twenty-five, perhaps, plainly of German parentage. Like Jerry, he was smooth-shaven, and there was a striking contrast between his dark hair and his singularly fair skin and blue eyes. He was a bricklayer, and ambitious of promotion. He spoke hopefully of an appointment in the Navy Yard as a result of a recent examination.
Jim was the only married man among us. His wife and three children were in Brooklyn, and Jim went home every Saturday night, and spent Sunday with them. He was a handsome young Scotsman, with curling brown hair, and brown eyes, and a well-formed mustache, and a round face with full features. In the casual flow of our talk, Jim spoke of Burns, and quoted him with a ready familiarity. It was easy to catch the drift of his liking. Its set was steadily toward passages which sing the wrongs and oppression of the poor. Jim had none of the tricks of a declaimer; but with jerks of unstudied emphasis he repeated familiar lines until you were conscious of new meaning and strength. He was sitting with his chair tilted against the wall, and his heels resting on a round, and his hands clasped about his knees. His eyes were fixed upon the evening gloom as he recited:
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
The verses seemed exactly to fit his mood, for he repeated them again and again, with lingering liking for their sense and alliteration.
Jerry broke in abruptly here with sudden, unmeasured condemnation of the dulness of evenings in a country town in the absence of the theatre, pronounced theátre. The drama had fired his imagination for the moment, for he broke through his wonted reserve and waxed fluent as he expressed his views:
"When I go to the theátre, I go to laugh. I want to see pretty girls and lots of them, and I want to see them dance. I want songs as I can understand the words of, and lots of jokes, and horse-play. You don't get me to the theátre to see no show got up by Shakespeare, nor any of them fellows as lived two thousand years ago. What did they know about us fellows as is living now? Pete, you mind that Tim Healy in the union, him that's full of wind in the meetings? Onct he give me a book to read, and he says it's a theátre piece wrote by Shakespeare, and the best there was. I read more'n an hour on that piece, and I'm damned if there was a joke into it, nor any sense neither."
We were presently yawning under the stars, and I was more than glad when the men spoke of bed. Almost in the next moment, to my consciousness, Mrs. Flaherty was knocking on the door, bidding us wake and not to go to sleep again, for it was six o'clock.
Of the five, this second day was the hardest. My body was sore in every part when I began to work, and the help of hardening muscles I did not gain until the third day. Mrs. Flaherty had skilfully bound up the slight wounds on my fingers. The merciful rain came twice to our relief, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. But this was not an unmixed blessing, for in the minutes of delay we could but calculate the growing loss in wages, and watch the sure vanishing of any surplus above actual living expenses. I remember making an estimate on my way to my lodgings that evening, and it was with much sinking of heart that I discovered that my earnings made a total rather less than the cost of the day's living.
There has been difficulty in the way of intercourse with the men. I speak no Italian, nor any of the Scandinavian tongues, so that my acquaintance has been confined to my own countrymen, who are few in number in the gang, and to the Irishmen and negroes, and an occasional Hungarian who understands my stammering German. And within the English-speaking circle, in the absence of this, there have been other barriers. There is wanting that social freedom that is most natural in Mrs. Flaherty's home. There is much of it among the foreigners. They hang together at their work, and sit in separate groups through the noon hour, and one commonly hears, especially among the Italians, that picturesque volubility which sets you wondering as to the subject of such fluent debate. Among the English-speaking men, the Irish and negroes are as Jews and Samaritans; but aside from this, the general attitude is one of sullen suspiciousness. Few appear to know the others, and not even their wretchedness draws them to the relief of companionship. Sometimes we hear warm greetings among acquaintances, or see some show of friendliness, but this is markedly out of keeping with the general tone of things. The usual intercourse is an exchange of experiences, an account of the circumstances which brought them to their present lot, among men who happen to be working side by side or sitting in company at the noon hour. Quite as commonly one hears only muttered curses against the boss.
You would gather from their own accounts that many of the men are unused to unskilled labor. There is a singular uniformity in their histories. Nearly all have seen better days, and are now but tiding over a dull season in their trades, or are earning enough to take them to some other part of the country, where there is a quickening in the demand for their labor.
I found myself growing doubtful of these unvarying tales. The mechanism became too apparent. "I am really an efficient and energetic workman," each seemed to say; "you see me now in a strait of circumstances. You should see me at my trade, in which I am an adept. I am out of that employment now because of depression in the business, but when business revives, or when I can reach Chicago or St. Louis or Minneapolis, my labor will be in strong demand." Irresistibly one is led to the belief that most of these men probably have no trade, or, at the best, are inefficient workmen, who, unable to keep a job long, habitually pick up a living at work like this, in the careless makeshift of a shiftless life.
It is refreshing to meet others who are frankly laborers. All their lives they have been bred to unskilled labor, and they make no pretence of anything different. They are hard men who look out upon a world that is hard to them at every point of contact; but they are true men, by virtue of their honesty and directness, and one likes them accordingly. Some of them are old, and it is pitiful to see them tottering under the burden of years, and staying off actual want by forcing their rheumatic limbs through the drudgery of this rude toil.
I had noticed the absence of one of this coterie for a day or two when, in the middle of a morning's work, he appeared among the ruins. He was an old Irishman. His face was swollen from toothache, and was bound up in a cotton bandanna. His hands were clasped on his stooping back, and he moved with the painful motion that suggests acute rheumatism. For a time he stood watching us at our work and exchanging words with some of the men about his complaints, when suddenly he burst into tears. The men jeered him, and angrily told him to be gone. I had a sickening feeling of cruelty as I saw him go sobbing down the road; but when I spoke of him at the noon hour the men explained that it was a disgrace to have him crying there, but that they would see that his wants were provided for.
There was a revelation in the discovery of the degree to which profanity is ingrained in the vernacular of these men, as representatives of the laboring poor. They swear with the readiness of instinct, not merely in anger, when their language mounts to a torrent of abuse unspeakably awful in its horrid blasphemies, but in commonest intercourse, when their oaths are as meaningless as casual interjections. And almost never is the rude hardness of their speech softened by the amenities which seem so natural a part of language. The imperative, more than any other mood, is rudely thrust into common use. They are even punctilious in its employment.
A single instance will serve to point the nature of this graceless speech. Two boys of ten or twelve are employed in carrying water to the men at their work. One carries his bucket through the building to those engaged in the upper stories; and the other, a flaxen-haired, delicate child whose thin legs bend under his burden, serves those of us who are at work on the heaps below. Through all the day, and especially in its greatest heat, the boys run busily from the works to a neighboring pump, and return with bucketfuls of water, which are at once surrounded by thirsty workmen and emptied in a few minutes. Regardless of the prevailing custom, I always thanked the little fellow for my drink. Soon I noticed that even this instinctive acknowledgment seemed to embarrass him. In an interval of rest he came up to me, after receiving my thanks. "You shouldn't thank me," he said. "And why not?" I begged to know. "Because, you see, I'm paid to do this," was his conscientious answer. A mere child, naturally gentle, and yet so bred to rougher usage that a simple "Thank you" jarred upon his sense of right! A few minutes later I saw the two boys in a rough-and-ready fight, and their language lacked none of the horror of that of their elders.
I shall be on the road again to-morrow morning, and I shall go as penniless as I came, but somewhat richer in experience. I have been through nearly a week of labor, and have survived it, and have honestly earned my living as a working-man. In the future I shall have the added confidence which comes of knowing that, if work offers, I shall probably be able to perform it. But this is not the only cause of my increased light-heartedness. I am frankly glad to get away from the job on the old Academic building. This is a selfish feeling, and is not without the cowardice of all selfishness. I hope for a job of another kind, for a time at least, because I wish to see some hopefuller side of the lot of common labor. When we draw too near to the hand of Fate, and begin to feel as though there were a wrong in the nature of things, it is best, perhaps, to change our point of view—if we can. This may account for some of the drifting restlessness among working-men of my class.
The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are unskilled laborers. We are grown men, and are without a trade. In the labor market we stand ready to sell to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. We are here, and not higher in the scale, by reason of a variety of causes. Some of us were thrown upon our own resources in childhood, and have earned our living ever since, and by the line of least resistance we have simply grown to be unskilled workmen. Opportunities came to some of us of learning useful trades, and we neglected them, and now we have no developed skill to aid us in earning a living, and we must take the work that offers.
Some of us were bred to farm labor, and almost from our earliest recollection we worked in the fields, until, tiring of country life, we determined to try some other; and we have turned to this work as being within our powers, and as affording us a change. Still others among us, like Wilson, really learned a trade; but the market offers no further demand for the peculiar skill we possess, and so we are forced back upon skilless labor. And selling our muscular strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a "reserve price." We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our labor. And for some of us there is other pressure, unspeakable, immeasurable pressure, in the needs of wife and children.
The contractor buys our labor as he buys other commodities, like brick and iron and stone, which enter into the construction of the new building. But he buys of us under certain restrictions to us both. The law of supply and demand does not apply to our labor with the same freedom as to other merchandize. We are human beings, and some of us have social ties, which bricks and iron have not, and we do not, therefore, move to favorable markets with the same ease and certainty as these. Besides, we are ignorant men, and behind what we have to sell is no trained intelligence, nor a knowledge of prices and of the best means of reaching the best markets. And then we are poor men, who must sell when we find a purchaser, for no "reserve price" is possible to us.
The law of supply and demand meets with these restrictions and others. If it applied with perfect freedom to our commodity, we should infallibly be where is the greatest demand for our labor; and with perfect acquaintance with the markets we should always sell in the dearest. But the benefits of perfect freedom of supply and demand would not be ours alone. If we sold in the dearest markets, the employer would as certainly buy in the cheapest. He has capital in the form of the means of subsistence, and can stand off for a "reserve price," and could force us to sell at last in the pinch of hunger, and in competition with starving men.
As matters are, our wages might rise, in an increased demand for labor, far above their present point; but even under pressure of decreasing demand, and with scores of needy men eager to take our places, our wages, if we had employment at all, would not fall far below their present level. So much has civilization done for us. It does not insure to us a chance to earn a living, but it does measurably insure to us that what we earn by day's labor, such as this, will at least be a living.
As unskilled laborers we are unorganized men. We are members of no union. We must deal individually with our employer, under all the disadvantages which encumber our position in the market as compared with his.
But his position is not an enviable one. He is a competitor in a freer market than ours. He has secured his contract as the lowest bidder, under a keener competition than we know, and in every dime that he must add to wages in order to attract labor, and in every dollar paid to an inefficient workman, and in every unforeseen difficulty or delay in the work, he sees a scaling from the margin of profit, which is already, perhaps, the narrowest that will attract capital into the field of production. The results of our labor are worth nothing to him as finished product until given sections of the work are completed. In the meantime he must advance to us our wages out of capital which is a product of past labor, his own and ours as working-men, and of other capital. And this he must continue to do, even if his margin of profit should wholly disappear, and even if ultimate loss should be the net result of the expenditure of his labor and capital. In every case, before any other commodity has been paid for, we have insured to us the price for which we have sold our labor.
Our employer is buying labor in a dear market. One dollar and sixty cents for a day of nine hours and a quarter is a high rate for unskilled workmen. And the demand continues, for I notice that the boss accepts every man who applies for a job. The contractor is paying high for labor, and he will certainly get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when the débris is cleared away and the site made ready for the constructive labors of the skilled workmen. In the meantime he must get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser, for the market would soon supply him with others to take our places.
We are ignorant men, and we have a slender hold of economic principles, but so much we clearly see: that we have sold our labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high for it, but not from philanthropic motives, and he will get at the price, he must get, all the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little as we can. And there you have, in its rudimentary form, the bear and the bull sides of the market.
You tell us that our interests are identical with those of our employer. That may be true on some ground unknown to us, but we live from hand to mouth, and we think from day to day, and we have no power to "reach a hand through time, to catch the far-off interest of tears." From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our employer. He plainly shares this lack of unity of interest; for he takes for granted that we are dishonest men, and that we will cheat him if we can; and so he watches us through every moment, and forces us to realize that not for an hour would he intrust his interests to our hands. There is for us in our work none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end of the week.
We expect the ready retort that we get what we deserve, that no field of labor was closed to us, and that we are where we are because we are fit, or have fitted ourselves, for nothing better. Unskilled labor must be done, and, in the natural play of productive activity, it must inevitably be done by those who are excluded from the higher forms of labor by incapacity, or inefficiency, or misfortune, or lack of ambition. And being what we are, the dregs of the labor market, and having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves, by means of which we can deal with our employer and he with us by some other than an individual hold upon each other, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and not only be directed in our labor, but be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are the hard, barren, hopeless lives that they are because of our own fault, and that our degradation as men is the measure of our bondage as workmen.
This seems to state an ultimate fact, and then, with the habit of much of such thinking, to settle itself peacefully, with an easy conscience, behind the inevitable.
But for us there is no such peace or comfort in the inevitable. And yet, even in this statement of our case, we are not without hope. We are men, and are capable of becoming better men. We may be capable of no other than unskilled labor, but why should we be doomed to perform it under the conditions which now degrade us at our work?
Imagine each of us an ideal workman. Through all the hours of the working-day we labor conscientiously, with no need of oversight beyond intelligent direction; for each of us feels the keenest interest in the progress of the work, because we are honest men, and, with far-sighted knowledge, we know that by our best labor in any form of useful production we are contributing our best to the general prosperity, as well as our own, and that it is by our energy and personal efficiency that we may open for ourselves a way to promotion. Here clearly is a solution on ideal grounds. Is there no remedy that can reach us as we are?
Our ambition must be fired, our sense of responsibility awakened and enlisted in our labor, our intelligences quickened to the vision of our own interests in the best performance of our duty. Life will not be rendered frictionless thereby. Work will still be hard, but to it will be restored its dignity, its power to call into play the better part of a man, and so build up his character.
We have already seen how such an end is realized in the initial betterment of character itself. Let us see whether something might not be done by an initial improvement in the conditions of employment.
Let us suppose now that we are not ideal characters, but ordinary men, whose lot in life is to perform unskilled labor; but let us suppose that we are an organized body of workmen. The contractor made terms with us as an organized gang for the removal of the old building. Our organization, from long experience of such work, was able to enter into an eminently fair agreement. The contract rests upon a basis of time. For the completed work we are to receive a fixed sum, provided that it is finished by a given date. If we finish the work, according to the terms of the contract, one week earlier, we are to receive a bonus in addition to the fixed amount; if two weeks earlier, there will be an increase in the bonus. In the meantime advances are to be made to us, week by week, in the form of days' wages, but so regulated as to protect the contractor against loss if the gang should fail to complete the work.
Every member of the gang is perfectly familiar with the terms of the contract, and knows thoroughly the advantages of an early completion of the job. We agree among ourselves upon the number of hours which shall constitute a day's work, and from our own number we elect a boss, who will give direction to our labor, and under whose orders we bind ourselves to serve. It is no part of his duty now to stand guard over us in the office of a slave-driver to prevent our shirking, for we effectually perform that service for ourselves, seeing to it, with utmost regard for our interests, that no man among us fails to do his share in the common task. The boss is now the best and most intelligent worker among us, and not only does he direct our efforts, but, with his own hands, he sets the example of energetic work for the securing of the best terms that the contract offers for our common good.
In a true sense now we have got a job. It is ours. The work is hard, but we have an object in working hard. Every stroke of labor is not a listless, time-serving economy of effort, but an eager and willing furthering of the work toward its completion and our own advantage. We are glad in the progress of our job, even if we are glad from no higher motive than our personal profit. We have a sense of responsibility and the keen interest which comes of that, even if they rise in no better source than our greed for gain.
It is true that the root of the matter lies deeper than this. We may work under hopefuller conditions and be, intrinsically, no better men. Our selfishness may take on the refinement of the altruism that merely seeks our own in the welfare of others; our ignorance may become illumined by an enlightened self-interest; our vices may assume respectability; and yet our old hardness of heart remain in full possession of us. But the truly pertinent question is this: Nearer to which of these ways of living lies the living way? In which have we the better chance to become better men? Life in its present course is to most of us a miserable bondage. We work daily to physical exhaustion; and, with no power left for mental effort, our minds yield themselves to the play of any chance diversion until they lose the power of serious attention. In what constitutes for us the work of life there is no pleasure, no education, no evoking of our better natures.
All truly productive labor performed under right conditions is itself a blessing. It partakes of the highest good that life offers. It is a bringing of order out of chaos, a victory over forces which can be reduced from evil mastery to useful service. It thus becomes the type of that labor which is the work of life, the mastery of self in the building of character. In this sense it was that the monks of the Middle Ages framed their motto, Laborare est Orare—labor is prayer. But robbed of its true conditions and reduced to the dishonor of time-service under the eye of a slave-driving boss, who impels us with insults infinitely more degrading than the lash, labor is no longer prayer, but a blasphemy, which finds expression in the words which rise readiest to our lips.
I have been writing from the position of an unskilled workman, with no apparent allowance for my newness to the life. The physical stress and strain, for example, how different my experience of these as compared with that of the other men inured to them by long habit! A year or two of such labor, and how great the physical change! My hands would be hard, and the friction of this work, so far from wounding them, would render them the more impervious to harm. My muscles would be like iron, and would lend themselves with far greater ease to the stress of manual labor. Ten years would find me a seasoned workman.
But under conditions of labor such as these, what changes other than physical would there be? My body might be hardened in fibre to the point of high efficiency in manual labor, but the hardening of mind and character—is it likely that this would be of the nature of the strength of more abundant life, or of the hardness of petrifaction?
I have received the strangest kindness from the men, the most tactful treatment of me as a novice. They laughed at my strenuous efforts to do what was so much easier to them, and they laughed when the boss singled me out for abuse, but never ill-naturedly, I thought. And those who made up to me, and with whom I picked up acquaintance, showed the kindest consideration. They never pressed me with embarrassing questions, but fell gracefully into the easy assumption that I was a factory hand or a "tradesman" out of a job. It was natural to adopt the general strain and speak of plans which involved my going West.
In spite of their roughness and hardness of manner and speech, one never felt the smallest fear of these men, and you had a growing feeling that their better natures were never far to seek. And yet in reality here they were, a cursing, blaspheming crew; men upon whose lives hopelessness seems to have settled; whose idea of work is a slavish drudgery done from the instinct of self-preservation and to be shirked whenever possible; whose idea of pleasure is abandonment to their unmastered passions.
I had a purpose in quitting work in the middle of Saturday afternoon. I went to my lodgings and asked Mrs. Flaherty for an early supper of anything that she could give me without trouble. Then I brushed my clothes and washed myself, and made myself as presentable as my slender pack permitted. My beard was now of nearly two weeks' growth, and my face was well burned by the sun, and my clothes, in spite of the protection of overalls, were much labor-stained.
I felt some security in my disguise, and after an early supper I walked over to see the sunset parade. On the road I met the men returning from the works, and had to run a gauntlet of questions as to whether I had left the job for good, and what I meant to do.
There was bustle in the camp; a running to and fro of cadets, who appeared to be subject to many calls; a nervous appearing and vanishing at the tent-doors of figures which were in process of achieving parade-dress; a hasty personal inspection of arms and uniform; and then suddenly, out of apparently inextricable confusion, there emerged, without a trace of disorder, the two companies, in double lines of perfect symmetry, before the inspecting officer.
Then followed the sunset parade. Seated on the benches under the trees, and grouped on the turf behind, was an eager crowd watching intently, in perfect stillness, every evolution of the cadets. The fascination was in the sense it gave you of abounding life, of youth and strength and vigor, brought to perfect unity in willing subordination to authority. Here was the type of highest organization, the voluntary submission of those who are "fit to follow to those who are fittest to lead." So much has civilization achieved for the purpose of self-defence. The mission of many of these young officers will be to take such men as those with whom I have been working, and teach them the manly lesson of obedience, and awaken in them the feelings of courage and loyalty and esprit de corps. Civilization is yet a long way from such organization for industrial ends, if ever such corporate action will be possible or good; but certainly it will not belong before civilization gives birth in increasing numbers to "captains of industry," who will feel with their men other ties than the "nexus of cash payment," and who will attack the problems of production with other aims than selfish accumulation. Under the direction of such leaders, workingmen will be led to far greater conquests over the resources of nature than any in the past, and, sharing consciously in these victories as the fruits of their own labors, there will open to them a new life of liberty and hope in willing allegiance to true control.
The intense satisfaction I felt in the rest of yesterday (Sunday) was heightened by a feeling of hopefulness as I thought of the future of workingmen in a country like ours. Here are almost boundless natural resources, capable of supporting many times our present population. Under the stimulus of private acclamation, what marvellous genius and skill and enterprise have directed labor to the development of our national wealth! When, with the growth of better knowledge, there is added to this stimulus among the great leaders of industry a sincere desire for the common good and a purpose to make the conditions of employment the means of achieving this good, how far greater must be the industrial results, and how far better the lives of the workers!
I felt aglow with this idea as I walked, in the afternoon, down the road below Highland Falls. It was a warm mid-summer day, and in keeping with its restful quiet the air moved gently among the leaves in the tree-tops. I was disturbed by the sound of music from the deck of an excursion steamer, and, seized with sudden desire for a glimpse of the river, I vaulted a low stone wall, and quickly made my way over the mossy carpeting of a wood which covers the bluff above the water.
I did not see, at first, the abrupt ending of the wood and the sweep of an open lawn, and when I caught sight of that I was only a few yards from a rustic bench. There two persons sat, with their backs toward me, but I recognized the girl at once as an acquaintance, and I knew that I was a trespassing vagrant. The man I knew well, for he was a college classmate and a charming fellow, and I longed to ask his views on the question of the improvement of the lot of unskilled laborers by means of organization.
But I grew painfully conscious of my work-stained clothes, and my faded flannel shirt, and the holes in my old felt hat, and of how all these marked me as belonging now to another world. And so I quietly stole away and returned to "mine own people."