“Not at all. It was this. We got a man in our employ—one of our best hands—an Irishman of the name of O'Day—who's been with us ever since we started manufacturing. You know, when we first went into business, we simply jobbed. We didn't begin to manufacture till '76. Well, that man, O'Day, a year or two ago, he contracted a kind of a nervous disease, which makes it impossible for him to do his work when the other workmen are around. He can work perfectly well alone; but in the room with the others, he gets excited, and loses his head, and can't take a stitch. At the same time, he's got a family to support. So we've given him a machine, and we allow him to do his work in his own home. Well, sir, the men, they're dead set against tenement-house labor; and they wanted us to discharge O'Day. We wouldn't. It struck us as such a dirty mean thing to do, that we made up our minds the Lord would punish us, if we did it. We made up our minds that if we did that, we'd deserve to have bad luck right along. So we told the men we wouldn't. We told them that we'd rather shut down and go out of the trade, than discharge O'Day—which was the fact. We said we'd always been a prosperous house; and that we believed we owed our prosperity chiefly to the fact that we'd never done any thing to offend the Lord. We said that right out. And we said also that if any other man in our employ should get in the same box, we'd treat him the same way. Well, as I say, the men, they thought it over, and they concluded that we were in the right.”
“Yes, sir,” added Mr. Blum, “we believe in treating our hands like feller-beings. I was a hand myself, already. Dot's a great advaintage. We don't go on the American plan, and treat them like machines.”
“Now, don't you get started on that subject,” cried Mr. Koch. “There's nothing he's so prejudiced about, as every thing American. I'm an Americain We're all Americans. The Americans are the grandest people on the face of the earth.”
“I don't see how you make dot out,” retorted Mr. Blum.
“Well, I'll tell you how I make it out. I make it out this way. But first, you just hold on. Let's see how you make it out. What do you judge the Americans from? What do you know about them, anyhow? Why, you meet a few of them downtown; and you're prejudiced against them, to begin with, because they're Christians; and they're prejudiced against you, because you're a Jew; and you and they don't understand each other, and don't get on together; and the consequence is, your mutual prejudices are simply intensified. Well, now, that ain't a fair way to judge a people. I'll leave it to Dr. Gedaza if it is. The right way is, not to take individuals, but to take public sentiment. Public sentiment, that is to say, the feeling of the people in general on questions of importance—that's the real index of a people's character, And there ain't another country in the world, where public sentiment is so high as it is right here in the United States of America.”
“In what respects?” questioned the rabbi.
Mrs. Koch put in: “You needn't scream so, Washington. We ain't none of us daif.” But her husband didn't hear her.
“In what respects?” he shouted, swelling with emotion. “Why, in—in every respect—on every question of honor and decency and morality. Here's a simple example. You go to Europe—you go to London, Berlin, Paris—I don't care which—and you notice the way the drivers beat their horses in the public streets; and nobody thinks any thing of it, nor dreams of interfering. If they tried to do it here, in New York, they'd be mobbed in no time. Well, that may seem a trifle; but it ain't a trifle. No, sir. For it points to a radical defect in the European character, and to a positive virtue in the American. It's the sense of fair play—that's what it is. Don't abuse a creature, simply because he's defenseless and you've got the upper hand. Do you see? Then take the American way of treating women. You let a respectable young girl, provided she's good-looking—you let Tillie, there—go out alone in Paris or Berlin, and when she gets back, you ask her whether she's been stared at, or insulted. But you let her go out here. Why, she could travel alone from New York to San Francisco, and not run a risk. Then take morality and decency. And take the American way of doing business—the big, generous scale on which every thing is done, and the sense of honor among business men. They're sharp and close, I admit, but they mean what they say every time. I tell you, it's grand, it's beautiful; it does me good every time I think of it. I go to Europe every two or three years on business; and I get a chance of comparing. It makes me sick, the depravity, the corruption, and the stinginess, you meet everywhere over there.”
The orator sank back in his chair, panting, and absent-mindedly mopped his brow with his napkin.
“Vail, dot's pretty good,” cried Mr. Blum, with cutting irony, “and what you say of them big American bank swindlers, hey? They do things on a generous scale, don't they?”