Men and Things

by Henry A. Atkinson

During the daytime thousands of trackmen have inspected the rails; other thousands have been at work repairing the ties, putting in new rails, and improving the grade. Telegraphers are continuously flashing their messages along the wires; their invisible hands guide these flying trains. In factories, workshops, mills, mines, forests, on steamships, on the wharves, wherever there are human beings, there is work being done. Work is as ceaseless and persistent as life itself.

The Song of the World of Work. You remember, perhaps, the first time that you visited a big city. From your room in the hotel you could hear the roar of the streets. That roar is made up of hundreds of separate sounds. It is the voice of work from the throat of the city. It changes with each hour of the night. Just before dawn there is a lull and the voice is almost quiet but only for a short period; then it takes on a new volume of sound and grows in intensity to the full force of its noonday chorus. What is this voice saying? It is telling the story, and pouring out the complaint, and singing the song of the world of work. The idler or the parasite is the exception. People can live without working, but such is human nature that the person is rarely found who is willing to bear the odium of being a member of the class that never toils.

Work and Life. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” This is a common question asked of every girl and boy. Very early in our lives we begin to try to answer this question. Our environment shapes our attitude toward life, and helps us to choose the type of work to which we think we are adapted, but, having once settled the question of the kind of work we are to do, that choice eventually determines, in a large measure, our character. Work is so much a part of our lives that it marks us and puts us in groups. All ministers are very much alike, doctors are alike, lawyers are alike, business men are alike, business women resemble each other, so do miners and woodsmen. In fact, the work that we do groups us automatically with the others in the same profession or trade. Work creates our world for us and also gives us our vocabulary. A man who made his fortune on a big cattle-ranch in the West moved with his family to Chicago. His wife and daughter succeeded in getting into fashionable society and with the money at their command made quite a stir in the social world. Foolishly they were ashamed of their old life on the ranch. They had difficulty in living down their past, and the husband never reached a place where his family could be sure of him. He carried his old world with him into the new environment. One of the standing jokes among their friends was the way in which this man told his cronies at the club how his wife had “roped a likely critter and had him down to the house for inspection.” This was his description of a young man who was considered eligible for his daughter’s hand. The men who have been brought up in mining communities use the phraseology of the mines. One of the most prominent preachers in America was a miner until he was past twenty years of age. His sermons, lectures, and books are filled with the phrases learned in his early life. A preacher in a fishing village in the northern part of Scotland, in making his report to the Annual Conference, stated: “The Lord has blessed us wonderfully this year. In the spring, with the flood-tide of his grace, there was brought a multitude of souls into our harbor. We set our nets and many were taken. These we have salted down for the kingdom of God.” Needless to say, he and his people were dependent upon the fishing industry for a living.

Purpose of Work. Life is divided into work and play. Work is the exertion of energy for a given purpose. People accept the claim of life as they find it with little or no protest because one must work in order to eat. The compulsion of necessity determines the amount of work and the amount of play in the average life. Even a casual study of the industrial life of to-day convinces one that work absorbs a large part of the time and conscious energy of all the people. The letters T. B. M. meaning “Tired Business Man” are now used to typify a fact of modern life. Business takes so much time and effort that it leaves the individual so worn out at the end of every day that he is not able to think clearly, or to render much service to himself or to his friends. He is simply a run-down machine and must be recharged for the next day’s work.

In one of the American cities a group of nineteen girls formed themselves into a Bible study class, and met at the Young Women’s Christian Association building on Thursday nights. A light, inexpensive dinner was served and the pastor of one of the churches was asked to teach the group. All of these girls were members of the church and were engaged in work in the city. One was in a secretarial position, four were stenographers, two were saleswomen, and thirteen were employed in a department store. The hours of work were long for the majority of the class. On Saturday nights they were forced to work overtime. The average wage for the group was $7.25 a week. Out of this they had to buy their food, pay for their rooms, buy their clothes, and pay their car-fare. Whatever was left they could save or give away just as they pleased. After the classes had been meeting for about six weeks, it developed that only four of the girls went to church with any degree of regularity. Ten of them gave as a reason for not going that they were so tired on Sunday mornings that they could not do their work and get up in time to go to church. When they did get up, there were dozens of hooks and eyes and buttons that had to be sewed on, clothes which had to be mended, and the week’s washing to be done. In telling of their experiences one girl said, “Sunday is really my busiest day.” These girls can be taken as typical of a large number of workers, men and women. Life to the majority becomes simply the performance of labor. Work is the whole end of existence. All brightness and cheer is squeezed out by the compulsion of labor.

In a Pennsylvania coal town the employees of the company live in a little village built around the coke ovens. There is not a green thing in the whole village. A girl from Pittsburgh married one of the men who was interested in the mines. They moved to this town, and she took all her wedding presents and finery with her. In three weeks the smoke had ruined her clothes, had made the inside of her little home grimy, and the dirt and soot had ground itself into the carpets and floor, till she said, “I feel that all the beautiful life that Frank and I had planned to live together has become simply an incidental adjunct to the coke-ovens.” We often hear it said that the minds of people are stolid, stodgy, or indifferent, and that they do not appreciate the best things in life. The wonder is that the masses of the people appreciate them as much as they do.

The Purpose of Life. A well-known catechism teaches that, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Herbert Spencer says, “The progress of mankind is in one aspect a means of liberating more and more life from mere toil, and leaving more and more life available for relaxation, for pleasure, culture, travel, and for games.” The struggle for existence consumes so much time that it becomes an end in itself. This ought not to be. The true purpose of life is not work, nor wealth, nor anything else that can be gained by human striving, but it is life itself. Therefore, the work that people do ought to contribute to an enrichment of life. We are indebted to Henry Churchill King for the splendid phrase, “The fine art of living.” William Morris said that whatever a man made ought to be a joy to the maker as well as to the user, so that all the riches created in the world should enrich the creator as well as those who profit by the use of the riches. Under the old form of production, where every man did his own work with his own tools, it was easy for him to take pleasure in the thing that he was making. The factory system breaks the detail of production into such small parts that no one worker can take very much pride in the actual processes of his work. It is not a very thrilling thing to stand by a machine and feed bars of iron into it for ten hours a day, and to watch the completed nuts or screws dropping out at the other end of the machine. The pleasure in the work must be secured from the conditions under which the work is performed—the cooperation in the production, and the feeling that the worker is a part, and is being blessed by being a part, of the modern industrial system.

Specialization in Work. Specialization has been carried so far that to-day there are very few skilled workers in the sense in which this term was used several years ago. Shoemakers very rarely know how to make shoes, for they now make only some one part of the shoe. The automobile industry, by methods of standardizing, is organized so that each worker performs some simple task. He repeats this over and over, but his task added to that done by the others, produces an automobile. In the glove factory one set of workers spend their lives making thumbs; another group stitch the back of the gloves. In the clothing industry some make buttonholes, others sew on buttons; some put in the sleeves, and others hem; each has a very small part to do. This specialization in industry has been carried so far that it is seldom that a worker knows anything about the finished product.

A study of the organization of labor shows to what extent specialization has been carried. One of the chief complaints of the American manufacturer is that his men and women are not loyal. There is undoubtedly ground for this complaint, but on the other hand it must be conceded that it is very difficult for a worker—in the garment trade, for instance—to be loyal to a long succession of buttonholes; and for glovemakers to be loyal to a multitude of thumbs. The lack of loyalty comes largely from the failure of the directors of modern industry to bring their workers into that relationship with the business which would give them a feeling that they are an essential part of the industry. Loyalty grows by what it feeds on. The specialization that has been going on has been the very force which has made the worker simply a part of the machine, and as such, detaches him from the business of which he ought to feel himself an integral part.

Unity of the Workers. The extent to which specialization has been developed has had another effect. While the process of differentiation has been carried on at a rapid pace, and the individual worker has known but little about the finished product, he has come to know a great deal about the other disintegrated units in the workshop, the mine, the factory, and the mill. Consequently, with the differentiation in the work there has been a growing solidarity or feeling of unity among the workers themselves. Evidence of this is found in the philosophy that there are only two classes of people in the world, the people who work and the people who do not work, and which is used by the revolutionary groups with tremendous force. We do not like to think of classes in America, but the forces of industrial life have created classes in spite of ourselves.