He nodded gravely.
"I have heard your story. Now listen to mine. I'm not without hope of enlisting your sympathy. Not for myself: I need, and will have, the sympathy of no man; but for the cause for which I fight, for which I hope and believe I shall be able to persuade you to fight. My mother was a poor woman—a woman of the people; my father—my God! the irony of it—a gentleman. He was, if the truth were known, something more than a gentleman. We are all gentlemen to-day, or think we are, and one has to make a distinction. He was more than a gentleman. He was an aristocrat. He was more, even, than an aristocrat; but we will not talk further of that now. She was my mother, but not his wife. She was the mother of his child, and he left her and her child to starve. We did not starve; but I pass over those years. When I was ten, she broke down, worked out, worn out, wearied out. Then I took over her burden. No matter what my work, no matter who my employer. There are thousands of such employers as he; there are millions of such workers as I—workers whom no law protects. You may not be cruel to a cat or dog; you may not over-work a horse. These are offences which are punishable by law. But your fellow-men and fellow-women, your clerk, your shop-assistant, your warehouse-man—these you may starve, sweat, over-work, underpay, these you may do to death if you like, and none shall say you nay. The sweating, the over-work, and the underpay are the least of the evils they endure.
"The one and only aim of most employers is making money. And 'making' money means taking money, the money which is the rightful property of others—means, in point of fact, swindling. But a good business man is shy of swindling his customers. The customer is a free agent. If he discovers he is being swindled he will take his custom elsewhere, and loss of custom means loss of money, which will not suit your business man. So he must needs look for somebody else to sweat and swindle—somebody who cannot take himself elsewhere at choice; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the somebodies are the unfortunate employees. They must be made to do the greatest possible amount of work at the least possible rate of pay. And that they be compelled to endure this wholesale blood-sucking and robbery, they must of necessity be kept in a state of subjection, of fear, of slavery, and bondage. All feeling of independence, of having a soul or a conscience to call their own, must be taken from them. They are the chattels of their master, the creatures of his will, depending—they and their wife and child, if wife or child there be—upon his whim and pleasure for the roof which covers their head, for the clothes they wear, for the very food which keeps body and soul together. Let them once feel any sense of independence—let them once feel that they can obtain shelter and clothes and food at the hands of another employer, and they will no longer consent to be sweated and robbed, underfed, underpaid, and overworked.
"There are several ways of bringing the unhappy employees to this state of servile subjection. One is to browbeat, to bully, and to intimidate, till their nerve be gone and their spirit be broken. But why stand it, you ask? Why not throw off these chains, and seek work at the hands of some employer who is considerate and just. The reason is that such an employer is not easy to find, and, when found, the chances are a hundred to one against his having a vacancy on his staff.
"Every man in a situation knows that there are thousands out, and that, were he to resign his post, it would be filled, almost at a moment's notice, and at any wage which an employer chose to offer. Such knowledge as that gives pause to the man who is minded to assert his independence, for out of his meagre salary it is almost impossible to save; and to be out of work even for a week or two, with nothing to fall back upon, means not only starvation for him and his, but means that every week he is out, the longer is he likely to remain so. It means shabby clothes; for how, without money, can he buy new clothes to keep up the appearance which is of so much importance to him when applying for a post? It means that in an incredibly short time he begins to look shabby and broken-down—begins to look, in fact, like one of life's derelicts, and, of life's derelicts, employers are apt to fight shy.
"Another reason why a man hesitates to throw off his chains is that some employers have been known to refuse a character to the clerk or assistant who has asserted his independence, and the independence of his class, by discharging himself; and at the man who comes seeking work, without a 'character,' no other employer will look. For an employee to dare to prove that he has been overworked and underpaid by discharging himself, and finding new employment, where the work is less and the rate of pay higher, would be an example (your employer argues) which would demoralise the whole staff. Such a state of things approaches to sacrilege, blasphemy, anarchy. It must not be permitted. Of the man who dares so to act, so to set employers as a class at defiance, an object-lesson must be made, lest so dangerous an example infect the workers who remain. I have known cases where, to such a man, not only has a character been refused, but where a trumped-up charge of theft, or insubordination, or other misconduct, has been brought against him, that he and his fellow-slaves may be taught the salutary lesson that, against Capital, Labour has no chance; against the employer, the employee has no appeal. It is slavery, a thousand times worse than that of the Chinese coolies about which some good folk have such tender consciences.
"In England we do not flog our white slaves. We only break their nerves, crush their spirit, and bully the manhood out of them. Two of my fellow-workers went out of their minds; one of us took his own life. You look incredulous—you think that sort of thing uncommon. They haven't enough mind left, most of them, to go out of it, so abject and cringing and timid do they become; and they haven't enough pluck left in them—broken-spirited as they are—to take their lives. So they only die, the weakly ones, or drag out their wretched lives, the strong ones, in daily terror of being discharged and of being thrown homeless, moneyless, to starve upon the streets. Perhaps to starve, and so to make an end of it, would be the best thing that could happen to them. For many employers, in addition to the sweating, encourage a system which leaves their employees with less spirit to call their own than a dog, less soul in their wretched bodies than a worm.
"In many business houses a system of espionage is established by which the wretched workers are encouraged to sneak and pry and play the cut-throat upon each other. If your fellow-slave gets two shillings a week more than you get, and you can detect him in a moment's slackness, a single mistake, and report it to the employer, it is possible that the poor wretch may be discharged and you may get his post and his extra pay. But you, in your turn, know that the man immediately below you is watching you greedily and in the same way, lest you, also, be guilty of a slip or an omission that, by reporting the matter to his principals, he may work you out, as you had worked out your predecessor, and so he may slip into your vacant shoes and your pay.
"It is a system of infamy—a system which breeds men and women who are lower in the scale of being than a louse. You think I exaggerate. But do you know what it is to wake up each morning so weary that you had scarce the strength to struggle up that you might go forth to work for the day's bread?
"I do, and so do tens of thousands in this London to-day.