"So much to do, so little time to do it."
I have never heard that hard-to-be-met argument so well answered as by a woman physician, who gave these reasons to her patient, one of the overdevoted ilk.
"Agreed," she said, "there is so much to do that you cannot possibly do it all, nor the half, nor the tenth, nor the fiftieth part of it. Furthermore, the struggle is going on for a long, long time, and there are occasions ahead when your aid will be needed as badly or more badly than today. And when that hour comes, if you do not take care of yourself now, you will not be there to furnish the help others require. Not that I think you are dangerously ill, but I'm reminding you that, at the rate you are going, your working years, the years during which your energy and your initiative will last, are going to be few, so pull up and go slow!
"You are a leader, and you are so, partly at least, because you are a highly trained person. It has taken many years to train you up to this pitch of efficiency. You can handle agreements, at a pinch you can draft a bill. You are a favorite and influential speaker. You are invaluable in a strike, and you have often prevented strikes. We all want you to go on doing all these things. Now, tell me, which is the most valuable to the whole labor movement, a few years of your activity, or many years?"
That puts the matter in a nutshell.
I do not wish to overlook the fact that there are exceptional occasions when overwork to the extent of breakdown or even death is justified, or to have it supposed that I think mere life our most valuable possession, or that there may not be many a time when truly to save your life is to lose it. But I repeat that habitual, everyday overwork, is uneconomical, injurious to the cause we serve, and likely to lessen rather than heighten the efficiency of the indispensable leaders when the supreme test comes.
VIII
THE TRADE UNION IN OTHER FIELDS
When we begin! to survey the vast field of industry covered by different occupations we get the same sense of confusion that comes to us when we look at an ant-heap. The workers are going hither and thither, with apparently no ordered plan, with no unity or community of purpose that we can discover. But those who have given time and patience to the task have been able to read order even in the chaos of the ant-hill. And so may we, with our far more complex human ant-hill, if we will set to work. The material for such a study lies ready to our hand in bewildering abundance; but to make any practical studies which shall aid the workers and the thinking public to follow the line of least resistance in raising standards of wages and of status as well will be the work of many years and of many minds. Even today there are some general indications of how the workers are going to settle their own problems.
Some foreign critics and some critics at home are very severe upon the backwardness of the labor movement in the United States, and in these criticisms there is a large element of truth. Yet there is one difficulty under which we labor on this continent, which these critics do not take into consideration. That is the primal one of the immense size of the country, along with all the secondary difficulties involved in this first one. There has never been any other country even attempting a task so stupendous as ours—to organize, to make one, to obtain good conditions for today, to insure as good and better conditions for tomorrow, for the wage-earning ones out of a population of over ninety millions spread over three million square miles. And with these millions of human beings of so many different races, with no common history and often no common language, this particular task has fallen to the lot of no other nation on the face of this earth. Efforts at organization of the people and by the people, are perpetually being undermined. Capitalism is nationally fairly well organized, so that there has been all the time more and more agreement among the great lords of finance, not to trespass on one another's preserves. But it is not so with the workers. Even in trades where there exists a formal national organization, there will be towns and states where it will either be non-existent or extremely weak, so that workers, especially the unskilled, as they drift from town to town in search of work, tend to pass out of, rather than into, the union of their trade. And thus members of every trade organization live in dread of the inroad into their city or their state of crowds of unorganized competitors for their particular kind of employment. Why, if it were Great Britain or Germany, by the time we had organized one state, we should have organized a whole country.