The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

How quick and sure is such an appeal to the human heart! It is the world-old charm, charming men anew. A royal road at last, a wide gate and a broad way leading unto life! The way of salvation made easy! It is the Patriarchs again trusting to their sacrifices; the old Jews to circumcision and the blood of Abraham; the spiritually blinded Christians to their outward symbols; and all of them deaf to that truest word of all philosophy, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”

It is so easy to conceive of some change in outward conditions, some “remedy,” some “solution” for the ills from which we suffer, and which, having been accepted, would lift life to a plane of harmonious and frictionless movement, and set us free henceforth to follow our own wills and purposes and desires. And it is so supremely difficult to realize that the way of life lies not that way at all, not in the pursuit of happiness nor in the fulfilment of our own wills, but in realizing that the universe is governed by laws of right and justice and truth, and in bringing our wills into subjection to those laws and our actions into harmony with them.

One of these laws, I take it, is the law “the universal brotherhood of man.” And it is by the practical denial of this law in the dealing of men with their fellow-men that much of the world’s cruelest misery has been caused, and much of the seed of terrible retribution has been sown.

It was their firm belief in the truth of brotherhood which gave to the words of the Socialists their greatest strength and charm. It was plainly fundamental to all their views. Ignorance and prejudice and unphilosophical thinking warped their expressed ideas and made their speeches very human, but yet in them all was this saving hold on truth, a living belief in the solidarity of the human race and in the responsibilities which grow out of the bond of universal kinship.

At the corner near my lodging-house I stood still for a few moments watching the deft movements of two young children who were busy near the curb. The long, wide street lay a field of glistening diamonds where the blue-white electric light was reflected from the snow. A drunken man reeled past me, tracking the untrodden snow at the sides of the beaten path along the centre of the pavement. A dim alley at my right lost itself in almost impenetrable darkness, on the verge of which a small wooden house appeared tottering to ruin and as though the weight of the falling snow were hastening its end. From out the alley came the figures of three young women who were laughing gayly as they crossed the street in company and walked on toward the post-office. The street was very still and lonely for that quarter, and the two little girls worked diligently, talking to each other, but oblivious apparently to everything but their task. I drew nearer to see what they were doing. A street-light shone strong and clear above them, and they were in the path of a broad stream of yellow glare that poured from the windows of a cheap chop-house. They were at work about a barrel which stood on the curb. I could see that it was full of the refuse of the eating-house. Scraps of meat and half-eaten fragments of bread and of vegetables lay mixed with bones and egg-shells and vegetable skins in a pulpy ooze, rising to the barrel rim and overflowing upon the pavement and in the gutter. An old wicker basket, with paper covering its ragged holes, rested between the children, and into this they dropped selected morsels of food. The larger girl was tall enough to see over the top of the barrel, and so she worked there, and I saw her little hands dive into the soft, glutinous mass after new treasures. The smaller one could only crouch upon the pavement and gather thence and from the gutter what edible fragments she could find. I watched them closely. The older child was dressed in thin, ragged cotton, black with filth, and her matted, stringy hair fell from her uncovered head about a lean, peaked face that was as dirty almost as her dress. She wore both shoes and stockings, but the shoes were far too large for her, and through their gaping holes the cold and wet entered freely. Her sister was more interesting to me. She was a child of four or five. The snow was falling upon her bare brown curls and upon the soft white flesh of her neck, and over the damp, clinging, threadbare dress, through which I could trace the delicate outlines of an infant’s figure. Her warm breath passed hissing through chattering teeth in the intervals between outbursts of a deep, hoarse cough which shook her frame. Through the streaking dirt upon her hands appeared in childish movement the dimples above the knuckles, and the dainty fingers, red and cold and washed clean at their tips in the melting snow, had in them all the power and mystery of the waxen baby touch.

With the quick illusion of childhood they had turned their task into a game, and they would break into exclamations of delight as they held up to each other’s view some discovered morsel which the finder claimed to be the best.

“What are you going to do with these scraps?” I asked of the older child.

Her bloodless lips were trembling with the cold, and her small, dark eyes appeared among the shreds of tangled hair with an expression in them of a starved pariah whose cherished bone is threatened. She clasped the basket with both hands and half covered it with her little body.

“Don’t you touch it!” she said, fiercely, while her anxious eyes searched the street in hope of succor.