Strikes and other “remedial measures” appear to have been as common then as they are now. The unions, like those of Rome later, were turbulent and insurgent.
In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III a deputation of workmen employed in the Theban necropolis met the superintendent and the priests with a statement of their grievances. “Behold,” said the spokesman, “we are brought to the verge of famine. We have neither food, nor oil, nor clothing; we have no fish; we have no vegetables. Already we have sent up a petition to our sovereign lord the Pharaoh, praying that he will give us these things, and we are going to appeal to the governor that we may have the wherewithal to live.” The response to this complaint was one day’s rations of corn. This appears to have been enough only while it lasted, for a few weeks later the workmen were in open revolt. Thrice they broke out of their quarter, rioting like mad and defying the police. Whether they were finally shot full of arrows by the Pinkerton men of the period the record does not state.
“Organized discontent” in the laboring population is no new thing under the sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity, and Omniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be very sure, and the sooner the “capitalist” can persuade himself to discern it the sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those who are able to live without physical toil and those who are not are a long way from final adjustment, but are about to undergo a profound and essential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution is a hope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to be bloody noses and cracked crowns, and the good persons who suffer themselves to be shocked by such things in others will have a chance to try them for themselves. The working man is not troubling himself greatly about a just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater part go to those who do not work with their hands, he will not consider too curiously any one’s claim to exemption. It would perhaps better harmonize with his sense of the fitness of things if the disadvantages of the transitional period fell mostly to the share of his benefactors; but almost any distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a whole to the other side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the meantime it is to be wished that the moralizers and homilizers who prate of “principles” may have a little damnation dealt out to them on account. The head that is unable to entertain a philosophical view of the situation would be notably advantaged by removal.
IV
It is the immigration of “the oppressed of all nations” that has made this country one of the most lawless on the face of the earth. The change from good to bad took place within a generation—so quickly that few of us have had the nimbleness of apprehension to “get it through our heads.” We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that we were taught at our father’s knees before the eagle became a buzzard. America is still “an asylum for the oppressed;” and still, as always and everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything but to be oppressed—makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly, but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his head above the surface with another gentleman underfoot.
All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of southeastern Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories of Europe—even of southeastern Europe—may not be a good man; I say only that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. Let us not deny him his grievance: he works—when he works—for men no better than himself. He is required, in many instances, to take a part of his pay in “truck” at prices of breathless altitude; and the pay itself is inadequate—hardly more than double what he could get in his own country. Against all this his cry is justified; but his rioting and assassination are not—not even when directed against the property and persons of his employers. When directed against the persons of other laborers, who choose to exercise the fundamental human right to work for whom and for what pay they please—when he denies this right, and with it the right of organized society to exist, the necessity of shooting him is not only apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he and his kind, of whatever nationality, are usually forgiven this just debt of nature and suffered to execute, like rivers, their annual spring rise constitutes the most valid of the many indictments that decent Americans by birth or adoption find against the feeble form of government under which their country groans. A nation that will not enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its people.
This “citizen soldiery” business is a ghastly failure. The National Guard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be a Greater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with which the civil authorities are too feeble to cope. How often does it do so? Mostly it fraternizes with, or is cowed or beaten by, the savage mobs which it is called upon to kill. In a country with a competent militia and competent men to use it there would be crime enough and some to spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a republic is without excuse. If we have bad laws, or if our good laws are not enforced; if corporations and capital are “tyrannous and strong;” if white men murder one another and black men outrage white women, all this is our own fault—the fault of those, among others, who seek redress or revenge by rioting and lynching. The people of a republic have always as good government, as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of person, property and liberty, as they merit. They can have whatever they have the honesty to desire and the sense to set about getting in the right way. If as citizens of a republic we lack the virtue and intelligence rightly to use the supreme power of the ballot so that it really
executes a freeman’s will
As lightning does the will of God
we are unfit to be citizens of a republic, undeserving of peace, prosperity and liberty, and have no right to rise against conditions due to our moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way, Messieurs the Masses, to correct public evils: put wise and good men into power. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or will not for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed when you submit and shot when you rise.