“Well, we have the same trouble here that you must have heard of in England. As you know now that the conditions are the same here, you won’t be surprised at the fact.”
“But the conditions,” the Altrurian pursued—“do you expect them always to continue the same?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the manufacturer. “We can’t expect them to change of themselves, and I shouldn’t know how to change them. It was expected that the rise of the trusts and the syndicates would break the unions, but somehow they haven’t. The situation remains the same. The unions are not cutting one another’s throats now any more than we are. The war is on a larger scale—that’s all.”
“Then let me see,” said the Altrurian, “whether I clearly understand the situation as regards the working-man in America. He is dependent upon the employer for his chance to earn a living, and he is never sure of this. He may be thrown out of work by his employer’s disfavor or disaster, and his willingness to work goes for nothing; there is no public provision of work for him; there is nothing to keep him from want nor the prospect of anything.”
“We are all in the same boat,” said the professor.
“But some of us have provisioned ourselves rather better and can generally weather it through till we are picked up,” the lawyer put in.
“I am always saying the working-man is improvident,” returned the professor.
“There are the charities,” the minister suggested.
“But his economical status,” the Altrurian pursued, “is in a state of perpetual uncertainty, and to save himself in some measure he has organized, and so has constituted himself a danger to the public peace?”
“A very great danger,” said the professor.