“Not that kind,” says the banker. “There’s a very peculiar thing about labor in New Damascus. It can live without work.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how. It just does. When anything happens these people don’t like they stop work. That’s all there is to it.”
“Is it a union town?”
“They don’t need a union.”
Bankers in New Damascus are like bankers anywhere else. They know much more than they believe and tell only such things as ought to be true. It is scandalous for labor to be able to live without work. That offends the economic law. It ought not to be so. Yet in so far as it is there is no mystery about it. The town is invisibly rich and has a miserly spirit. There are as many banks as churches,—and the people are very religious. The banks are full of money that cannot be loaned in New Damascus. It is sent away to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York to put out at interest on other people’s enterprise. If you ask why that is the answer is cynical.
“Perhaps,” says the banker, “we know each other too well.”
But you see how it is that labor may live without work. Everybody has something by,—a home, a bit of land, a little hoard to sit upon. Spending is unfashionable. Carried far it is sinful. Living is very cheap. Three mornings a week the farmers come in with fresh killed meat, sausage, poultry, eggs, cheese, butter and vegetables and turn the main street into an open air market; and there is an ordinance which forbids the shopkeepers to buy any of this produce before ten o’clock. By that time there is nothing left, or if there is no dealer wishes to buy it, since the demand is already satisfied.
But there is still the question: What happened to New Damascus?
Ask John Tizack, the tobacconist, in the old Wardle building. He meets you with the air of a man of the world and pretends to be not in the least surprised when you say: “I’ve asked everybody else and now I ask you. What’s the matter with this place?”