The Empty Sack

by Basil King

"There's an old saying, a variant on something said by Benjamin Franklin, which we might remember oftener than we do. It's terse, pithy, humorous, wise. Some one has called it the finest bit of free verse composed in the eighteenth century. Listen to it. 'It is hard to make an empty sack stand upright.' So it is. The empty sack collapses of its own accord. It can't do anything but collapse. It was not meant to stand upright. To demand that it shall stand upright is to insist on the impossible. A full sack will stand as solid as a tree. A group of full sacks will support one another. Put the empty sack among them and from the very law of gravitation it will go down helplessly. Now, gentlemen of the jury, you're being asked to bring in a verdict against the empty sack—the sack that's been carefully kept empty—because it hasn't the strength and stability of that which all the coffers of the country have combined to fill."

With this as a text, Stenhouse drew a picture of the industrious man who is limited by the very nature of his industry. He is not limited by his own desire, but by the use society wishes to make of him. Serving a turn, he is schooled to serve that turn, and to serve no other turn. This schooling takes him unawares. He doesn't know it has begun before waking to find himself drilled to a system from which only a giant can escape. Few men being giants, the average man plods on because he doesn't know what else to do. There is rarely anything else for him to do. Having taken the first ill-paid job that comes his way, he hasn't meant to give himself to it all his life. He dreams of something bigger, more brilliant, more productive. The boy who runs errands sees himself a merchant; the lad who becomes a clerk looks forward to being a partner; the young man who enters a bank is sure that some day he will be bank president.

"Sometimes, gentlemen, these early visions work out to a reality. But in the vast majority of cases, the youth, before he ceases to be a youth, finds himself where the horse is when he has once submitted to the bridle. He can go only as he is driven. Life is organized not to let him go in any other way. Needing him for a certain purpose, it keeps him to that purpose. Work, taken as a great corporate thing, is made up of hundreds of millions of tiny tasks each of which calls for a man. The man being found, he must be trimmed to the size of his task."

Stenhouse had no quarrel with methods universally followed by civilized man. To criticize them was not his intention, as it was not his intention to complain because man had not yet brought in the Golden Age.

"But I do claim that the smaller the task to which a man is nailed down, and the smaller the pay he is able to earn, the greater the responsibility of collective society toward that individual."

There was a time, he declared, when much had been said to the discredit of slavery; but one thing could be urged in its favor. The man who had been kept throughout his life to one small job was not thrown out in his old age to provide for himself as he could. Having worked for society, as society was constituted then, society recognized at least the duty of taking care of him. Stenhouse disclaimed any comparison between free American labor and a servile condition; he was striving only for a principle. Men couldn't be screwed down during all their working lives to the lowest wage on which body and soul could be kept together, and then be judged by the same standards as those who had had opportunity to make provision for themselves and their families. The same interpretation of the law couldn't be made to cover the cases of the full sack and the empty one.

"And yet," he went on, changing his tone with his theme, "the empty sack is of value because it can be filled. Coarse, cheap, negligible as it seems, it is much too good to throw away. It is an asset to production, to the country's trade, to the whole world's wealth. And, gentlemen, what shall we say when we call that empty sack—a man?"

The value of the human asset was the next point to which he led his listeners.

"It is only a truism to say that among all the precious things with which the Almighty has blessed his creation the most precious is a human life; and yet we live in a world which seems to believe this so little that we must sometimes remind ourselves that it is so. Within a few years we have seen millions of men reckoned merely as stuff. As productive assets to the race, they haven't counted. We could read of a day's loss on the battlefield running up into the thousands and never turn a hair. We came to regard a young man's life as primarily a thing to throw away. It is for this reason, gentlemen of the jury, that I venture to remind you that a young man's life is primarily a thing to save. It may be a truism to say that a human life is the most precious of all created things; but it is a truism of which we are only now, to our bitter and incalculable cost, beginning to realize the truth."

He went on to draw a picture of the contributions to the general good made by the Folletts, father and son. Their work had been humble, but it had been essential. Essential work faithfully performed should guarantee an old age protected against penury. He reminded his hearers that he was not opposed to the law of supply and demand, which was the only known method by which the business of the world could be carried on. He only pleaded for the same humanity to a man as was shown to a broken-down old horse. From his one interview with Lizzie, Stenhouse had got what he called "the good line," "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn." Of this he now made use, following it up with St. Paul's explanation: "Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth may plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope."