These pamphlets came into my hands at a time when work was getting scarcer every day and a million men like myself were moving about the country looking for jobs. Then for the first time I realized my need for a broader education. If these things were true, it was my duty to stop chasing the vanishing job and begin to organize the workers so that they might destroy the capitalists. But how could I know whether they were true? I had no knowledge of past history. And without knowing the past how could I judge the future? I was like the old man who had never seen a railroad train. His sons took him thirty miles over the hills and brought him to the depot where a train was standing. The old man looked things over and saw that the wheels were made of iron. “It will never start,” he said. He knew that if his wagon had heavy iron wheels, his team could never start it. But his sons said: “It will start all right.” They had seen it before; they knew its past history. Soon the train started, gathered speed like a whirlwind and went roaring away down the track. The old man gazed after it and then, much excited, he exclaimed. “It will never stop!”
The wisest head is no judge unless it has in it the history of past performances. I had not studied much history in my brief schooling. The mills called me because they needed men. Good times were there when I arrived, and as for hard times, I was sure they “would never start.” Now the hard times were upon us and panic shook the ground beneath our feet. “It will never stop,” men cried. Had they studied the history of such things they would have known that hard times come and hard times go, starting and stopping for definite reasons, like the railway train.
I had done the right thing in quitting school and going to the puddling furnaces at a time when we needed iron more than we needed education. The proverb says, “Strike while the iron is hot.” The country was building, and I gave it iron to build with. Railroads were still pushing out their mighty arms and stringing their iron rails across the western wheat lands. Bridges were crossing the Mississippi and spanning the chasms in the Rocky Mountains. Chicago and New York were rising in new growth with iron in their bones to hold them high. My youth was spent in giving to this growing land the element its body needed.
Now that body was sick. What was the matter with it? Lacking an education, I was unprepared to say. When I left school my theory was that every boy should learn a trade as soon as possible. Now I saw that a trade was not enough. A worker needs an education, also. The trade comes first, perhaps, but the education ought to follow on its heels.
During the next ten years of my life I was a worker and a student, too. My motto was that every one should have at least a high-school education and a trade.
CHAPTER XXIII. THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION
That caravan of railroad cars bearing the happy lodge members to their meeting in the Rockies, had started a train of thought that went winding through my mind ever after. In fancy I saw the envious Bannerman shaking his fist at his thriftier, happier brothers. Should I denounce the banding together of men for the promotion of fun and good fellowship? Were these men hastening the downfall of America as the communist predicted? Is not good fellowship a necessary feeling in the hearts of civilized men?
Love of comrades had always been a ruling passion with me. I joined my union as soon as I had learned my trade, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers of North America. It was a long name, and we liked every word in it. We felt the glow of brotherhood, and as I said before, we used to share our jobs with the brother who was out of work. The union paid a weekly benefit to men who had to strike for better working conditions. At that time there were no death benefits nor any fund to educate the children of members killed in the mills. When such a death happened, the union appointed a committee to stand at the office window on pay-day and ask every man to contribute something from his wages. There is a charitable spirit among men who labor together and they always gave freely to any fund for the widow and orphans. This spirit is the force that lifts man above the beasts and makes his civilization. There is no mercy in brute nature. The hawk eats the sparrow; the fox devours the young rabbit; the cat leaps from under a bush and kills the mother robin while the young are left to starve in the nest. There is neither right nor wrong among the brutes because they have no moral sense. They do not kill for revenge nor torture for the love of cruelty, as Comrade Bannerman would in praying that the train be wrecked and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. The beasts can feel no pity, no sympathy, no regret, for nature gave them no conscience. But man differs from all creation because he has a moral sense, he has a conscience. My conscience has been a very present thing with me through all my life. I am a praying man. I never take a doubtful step until I have prayed for guidance.
“You'll never get anywhere, Jim,” fellows have said to me, “as long as your conscience is so darn active. To win in this world you have got to be slick. What a man earns will keep him poor. It's what he gains that makes him rich.” If this is so, the nation with the lowest morals will have the most wealth. But the truth is just the opposite. The richest nations are those that have the highest moral sense.