The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. / Interviews

by Robert Green Ingersoll

The same thing can be said of Denmark and Sweden, of England, Scotland, Ireland and of Italy. The truth is, that in all those lands the laboring man can earn just enough to-day to do the work of to-morrow; everything he earns is required to get food enough in his body and rags enough on his back to work from day to day, to toil from week to week. There are only three luxuries within his reach—air, light, and water; probably a fourth might be added —death.

In those countries the few own the land, the few have the capital, the few make the laws, and the laboring man is not a power. His opinion in neither asked nor heeded. The employers pay as little as they can. When the world becomes civilized everybody will want to pay what things are worth, but now capital is perfectly willing that labor shall remain at the starvation line. Competition on every hand tends to put down wages. The time will come when the whole community will see that justice is economical. If you starve laboring men you increase crime; you multiply, as they do in England, workhouses, hospitals and all kinds of asylums, and these public institutions are for the purpose of taking care of the wrecks that have been produced by greed and stinginess and meanness—that is to say, by the ignorance of capital.

Question. What effect has the protective tariff on the condition of labor in this country?

Answer. To the extent that the tariff keeps out the foreign article it is a direct protection to American labor. Everything in this country is on a larger scale than in any other. There is far more generosity among the manufacturers and merchants and millionaires and capitalists of the United States than among those of any other country, although they are bad enough and mean enough here.

But the great thing for the laboring man in the United States is that he is regarded as a man. He is a unit of political power. His vote counts just as much as that of the richest and most powerful. The laboring man has to be consulted. The candidate has either to be his friend or to pretend to be his friend, before he can succeed. A man running for the presidency could not say the slightest word against the laboring man, or calculated to put a stain upon industry, without destroying every possible chance of success. Generally, every candidate tries to show that he is a laboring man, or that he was a laboring man, or that his father was before him. There is in this country very little of the spirit of caste—the most infamous spirit that ever infested the heartless breast of the brainless head of a human being.

Question. What will be the effect on labor of a departure in American policy in the direction of free trade?

Answer. If free trade could be adopted to-morrow there would be an instant shrinkage of values in this country. Probably the immediate loss would equal twenty billion dollars—that is to say, one-third of the value of the country. No one can tell its extent. All thing are so interwoven that to destroy one industry cripples another, and the influence keeps on until it touches the circumference of human interests.

I believe that labor is a blessing. It never was and never will be a curse. It is a blessed thing to labor for your wife and children, for your father and mother, and for the ones you love. It is a blessed thing to have an object in life—something to do— something to call into play your best thoughts, to develop your faculties and to make you a man. How beautiful, how charming, are the dreams of the young mechanic, the artist, the musician, the actor and the student. How perfectly stupid must be the life of a young man with nothing to do, no ambition, no enthusiasm—that is to say, nothing of the divine in him; the young man with an object in life, of whose brain a great thought, a great dream has taken possession, and in whose heart there is a great, throbbing hope. He looks forward to success—to wife, children, home—all the blessings and sacred joys of human life. He thinks of wealth and fame and honor, and of a long, genial, golden, happy autumn.

Work gives the feeling of independence, of self-respect. A man who does something necessarily puts a value on himself. He feels that he is a part of the world's force. The idler—no matter what he says, no matter how scornfully he may look at the laborer—in his very heart knows exactly what he is; he knows that he is a counterfeit, a poor worthless imitation of a man.

But there is a vast difference between work and what I call "toil." What must be the life of a man who can earn only one dollar or two dollars a day? If this man has a wife and a couple of children how can the family live? What must they eat? What must they wear? From the cradle to the coffin they are ignorant of any luxury of life. If the man is sick, if one of the children dies, how can doctors and medicines be paid for? How can the coffin or the grave be purchased? These people live on what might be called "the snow line"—just at that point where trees end and the mosses begin. What are such lives worth? The wages of months would hardly pay for the ordinary dinner of the family of a rich man. The savings of a whole life would not purchase one fashionable dress, or the lace on it. Such a man could not save enough during his whole life to pay for the flowers of a fashionable funeral.