The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Yet, after all, it was the personal note that they touched most effectively in what they said. Strong, sturdy men, with every mark upon them of workmanlike efficiency, spoke feelingly of the relation, which they said, was growing up between what they called “the two great classes of society,” the employing and the employed. They declared the wage-earner essentially a “wage-slave” under present conditions, and they contrasted his lot unfavorably with that of an actual bondsman. The chattel-slave, they said, his master buys outright, and having made him thus a part of his invested capital, he shields him, out of a purely selfish motive, it is true, yet shields him, from bodily harm. But not the body of an industrial slave, merely his capacity for work, his employer buys, and he may drive him to the exhaustion of his last power of endurance, knowing perfectly well that, should he wreck him physically, the labor market would instantly supply a hundred men eager to take the vacant place on the same terms. And it is little relief to the feelings of the wage-slave, they added, to be assured that he is not sold, but is free to sell his labor in the open market, when he recalls the hard necessity that conditions that freedom. It was interesting to find them paraphrasing, as Old Pete had done in the logging camp, the dictum of Carlyle—

“Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the liberty to die by starvation, is not so divine.”

Then, as an expression of the belief of the gathering, a member introduced a resolution which pronounced it to be a truth in the relation of the individual to society, that “in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a living, should refuse to work, and should steal, he would be a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his personal liberty and be forced to work. But in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a chance to earn a living, should find no opportunity, and should, therefore, be forced to steal, society would be the criminal, and ought to furnish the remedy.”

The resolution was passed unanimously and with much show of approval. But I was more interested in its introducer. He was a curious departure from the prevailing type; short and straight and slender, with a small, thin face whose skin was like old, exquisite, wrinkled parchment. His bright eyes, set close together, moved ceaselessly as though sensitive to a certain mental restlessness; a thin aquiline nose curved delicately in the nostrils above a gray mustache which half concealed a thin-lipped mouth of uncertain drawing. Over all was a really fine, dome-like brow, quite bald and polished, while from the sides and back of his head there grew a mass of iron-gray hair which fell curling to his shoulders. I shall take the liberty of calling him “the Poet.” There was a nervous grace in his movements, and a thorough self-possession in his manner, and a quality of cultivation and refinement in his voice and speech, which were clearly indicative of breeding and education and of native talent. Yet his position among the Socialists seemed not at all that of a distinctive leader; he was simply one of the company, on terms of perfect equality, and he addressed the others and was himself addressed with the fraternal “Comrade” in all the intimacy of primitive Christianity. It was with instant anticipation of the pleasure of it that I learned from the announcements that the Poet would read, in an early meeting, a paper on the burning question of the opening of the World’s Fair on Sundays.

A woman sat near the front. I had seen her in frequent whispered consultation with the chairman, whom I shall call “the Leader,” and with the Poet and the Peddler and other members who sat about her, and I judged that she was high in the councils of the Socialists, and I shall name her “the Citizeness.”

In the midst of the applause which marked the passage of the resolution, she was on her feet—a dark, portly woman of middle age, dressed very simply in black, bearing herself with an air of accustomedness which showed that she was by no means a novice on the floor, and speaking, when quiet was restored, with a directness and an unaffected ease which had in them no loss of femininity. But you had only to watch closely in order to see nature avenge herself in a certain self-assertation which the Citizeness felt forced at times to assume, for the sake of emphasis, and in a certain very feminine straining after the sarcastic.

IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET.

She held a newspaper in her hand, and from it, she said, she wished to read a fragment of a speech made by Mr. —— to a large gathering of his subordinates in the administration of a railway system of which he is the president.

It was a short paragraph, in the characteristic, oratorical English of that genial railway president when he becomes serious, and its purport was simply a charge to those who bear to workingmen the relation of authoritative direction to treat them with the utmost consideration. “These are anxious times,” he said, substantially, “and there are grave indications which go to show that workingmen are increasingly regarding themselves as a class apart and their interests as being antagonized by those of their employers. All employers and directors of labor in all personal contact with their men should, therefore, exercise the greatest care in their treatment of them, to the end that these men may not be made to feel unnecessarily what is distasteful to them in their condition of subordination.”