This situation, coupled with the meager wages, the enormous wealth of the corporation which controlled it all, the utter indifference of those who sat at the top to those who worked at the bottom, was a difficult thing to endure. It was so very apparent to any one who thought that the work of those at the bottom was entirely without point save as a means of subsistence. To lift and carry, to move along given lines and within certain limits—this was the sum and substance of wisdom required, and it mattered little who did it. Some small personal characteristics figured in, such as whether a man was naturally quick or slow, good-humored or ill-humored and the like, but the main point was to do the work as conceived, planned, initiated and developed by some one above. And this could be acquired until it was not a matter of thought but of rote. What you thought or how you felt was not involved.
One of its pathetic aspects was that it was involved with the maintenance of a condition which was not necessarily beneficial or worthy of approval. So many of the owners, for whom these thousands upon thousands of individuals labored, were mere idlers in society, social loafers, daily bulletined as the chief factors in a dozen trivial amusements, and as wholly unconscious of this under-condition which made for their situation and pleasure as if it did not exist at all. For every motion and bending here, some one else was deriving the privilege not to move or bend there. It was as if some untoward power were momentarily taking something from each of these and giving it to some one who did not even know whence it came.
And the saddest part of it was that these toilers, born for the most part to a condition and with brains unsuited to anything much better, were still not so dull that they could not see, and that rather plainly, how scurvily Nature was using them, with what a vast, contemptuous indifference. It was little to Her whether they lived or died, did poorly or well. Most of them were mere machines who had acquired the little they knew by observing others, who, if they were capable of thinking at all, were restricted by the nature of their labor in utilizing thought, and yet they could see so plainly that those above them did very little or nothing, and received much, so much more. It was one of those situations in which labor, a mere round of motions, took the place of thought and left them weary and disinterested at the close of the day, not fit to originate a thought if it had been possible or necessary.
And yet, after a time, it occurred to me that it was not, perhaps, so much the thoughtlessness of it that was so wretched as that any human being, toiling to his full capacity, should not receive more of the legitimate profits of his labor. These men, ignorant and, in a way, valueless without direction, were nevertheless useful creatures and, in this sense if no other, were deserving of a far more reasonable share of the profit which their efforts created. That it should not be so, that despite their willing or non-willing they should be driven early and late to create a surplus which was not directly applied to the pressing needs of society as a whole, but to the frittering amusements of the few, not much better in the main than themselves, seemed hard.
And yet sometimes when I looked out upon the world as it glimmered before my windows—when I saw, as it so chanced, the waters of the river flowing by, the splendid boats riding at anchor or steaming peacefully past, and the wonder of the hills and hollows, all set suggestively before the eyes—it came to me that, perhaps, in spite of the seeming injustice involved in this situation, variety was as essential to happiness as so-called justice or equation, and that the very inequalities I was bemoaning were the things which I was admiring in Nature. To blot out the light and the shadows, to remove the hills and dales, to take away the far reaches which spread between luxury and want, idleness and toil—might not these be the things which after all would rob life of much of its value and charm? Might they not?
But as I turned again to the weariness of my labor and saw once more the routine, the comparative slavery, the drag of almost endless hours, I could not help wishing for each that there might be some better solution than this necessity for variety—that perhaps the heights and hollows need not after all be so vast. To survey a mountain, to view a desert—was not this the privilege of but a few? And might not the true beauty of life exist in the way-places where are neither heights nor depths but only a tender and appealing undulation? I wondered, and still do, for in spite of endless personal inconvenience I have never been able to believe that an unbreakable dead level of equality should maintain, that none should suffer overmuch, that none should want to the extreme. And yet at this time, in this place, the less varied seemed the all-to-be-desired. That it was not to be found in so starkly diversified a world as here offers did not lessen the pain of the labor or the value of the ideal in the least. To work, to wait, to hope, to pray for some such change—how important these loomed in the hour of weariness! And yet the charm that hope cast over effort was as though the difference had already in part been bridged and that the realization of the ideal was almost at hand.
III
The toil of the laborer is without mercy, its grim insistence unrequited by anything save the meager wages wherewith it is paid. There is no true beauty in it, no tenderness. There is no thought of anything save what muscle and the strength of the individual can be made to yield. More than this, the sum of what is accomplished passes almost entirely into other hands. There is no provision made for those who will be as tattered remnants when the things for which they labored have been accomplished.
For several months I worked with the laborers for a great railroad. It was the kind of labor that falls to the lot of every man who is unskilled and whose sense of honesty or compulsion or duty or need commands that he labor. Those with whom I worked were employed to carry lumber, load brick, shovel earth and mix mortar. The work was requited at the rate of fifteen cents an hour, and nothing more than this was allowed for overtime. We worked nine or ten hours a day, as the light permitted. There was no rest for those here employed save in a form of subterfuge, which was as wearisome as the toil itself to one not accustomed to it by long years of practice. To be sure one might delay in the carrying of anything; it was possible to be deliberate, to hang first on one foot and then the other; there was a way of resting on one’s pick before lifting it; but the gain was scarcely worth the pains. At the close of the day the sum of idleness thus secured would not be sufficient to produce a restful feeling, and the knowledge that a watchful foreman was well aware of the spirit of your labor was not conducive to comfort.
We were under a foreman whose conception of life was that it meant toil, and who himself was perfectly equipped physically to meet it. He did not stop to parley or temper the necessities with tenderness but shouted and cursed his commands, the fulfilling of which was as much of a burden on his mind as upon our bodies. Work there was in plenty, vast quantities of labor extending into the weeks and years, and the only thought which the conclusion of one hard day’s toil could bring was that there was another exactly like it tomorrow. It had no end for the individual save in arbitrary cessation on his part, the ending of his pay, or in disintegration and death. And need drove so many to continue day after day, without rhyme or reason in so far as the individual was concerned.