The workingman is too often satisfied to do whatever is before him without fitting himself to do anything else in case of accident or change of business, or lack of demand, or any one of the various other accidents that may occur to disturb the even routine of his life. No man in any other line of business dare be so careless. There are clerks and book-keepers and men in the highest mechanical arts who are very good in their places, but who never fit themselves for anything better or anything else. These men are slaves—literally. Their employers know it, if the slaves themselves don’t. No matter how honest they may be, no matter how capable they are in their own specialties, these are the men who always are passed over when promotions are to be made, or when men are to be selected for higher positions.
By a strange coincidence these are also the men who grumble most at their rate of pay, their hours, the amount of work they have to do, and the manner in which their employers treat them. Many of them are such good fellows personally, so full of human virtues that are not specially business virtues, that they excite a great deal of sympathy among their acquaintances, but in the case of any acquaintance who happens also to be an employer there is no sympathy whatever.
The American workingman, above all others on the face of the earth, needs to take this warning to heart, for one result of competition has been the subdivision of most varieties of mechanical labor to a degree which requires twenty or thirty men sometimes to complete a bit of work which once was done by a single individual. Undoubtedly work can be done cheaper in this way, and both capital and labor have some obligations to fulfil toward the consumer, but the less a man is a “full-handed workman,” which means that he can do all branches of the business in which he is engaged, the more necessary it is for him to be prepared to do something else in case of emergency.
To illustrate: there was a time, almost within the memory of the present generation, when miniature painting was the most profitable division of art work in the United States. A fine miniature would bring more money than an oil painting. Suddenly the process of daguerreotyping was discovered. Then came the ambrotype and photograph, and other cheap methods of making accurate likenesses, and as a consequence miniature paintings became less and less in demand, and the few members of the profession who still survive have none at all of the work at which they once were famous. Some of them took to drawing on wood, others went into oil portraits, some devoted themselves to water-colors, and others went into mechanical businesses where a good and accurate eye for color and proportion commanded good pay. But if the miniature painters, whose misfortunes were greater than those of any class of common laborers now complaining to the public, had insisted that the public owed them a living and they were going to have it, and that Congress should make laws enabling them to get a living out of their business, they would have been laughed to scorn. The miniature painters had no more brains than mechanics. What is fair for one is fair for another.
One of the first things that the young laboring man does is to take a wife. A wife is a desirable object of possession. So is a horse, a yacht or a handsome house, but the man who would load himself with either while he sees no means of supporting it except by weekly earnings which might be stopped at short notice by any one of a dozen accidents to life or business, would be regarded as a fool. Some people would call him a scoundrel. Yet when financially pushed a man can sell a horse or yacht, and get at least part of the value while getting rid of responsibility. He cannot sell a wife, though, even if he is willing. That sort of business has become illegal. Even if it had not, the probabilities are that a wife, taken by a fellow who is so reckless as to marry before he is able to properly care for so precious and complicated a bit of property as a woman, would not be in salable condition.
The possession of a wife implies, quite implies, occasional bits of income, but also of responsibility, in the shape of children. “He who has wife and children has given hostages to fortune.” The rich man knows this to his cost, though he may get enough delight out of the experience to pay him a thousand times over. But to the poor man dependent upon daily wages, and with no property or savings to fall back upon, a family is often fetters, with ball and chain to boot. Thank God, such bonds often feel as light as feathers and soft as silk, but these sensations do not decrease the weight or dragging power one particle. If a man determines to marry while he has nothing to marry on, let him at least be honest with himself, tell himself that he is going to be the slave of whoever employs him, and blame himself instead of employers, or capital, or public opinion for the consequences.
There is a large class of workingmen who do not seem to think they are fit for anything but what they are doing. Such men may be honest, cheerful, obedient, industrious, painstaking and obliging. Well, slaves have been all this and more. Such men are bound to be slaves. Nothing that trade unions, Knights of Labor, law, religion or public sentiment can do, can save them from practical slavery.
The men who organized any State, county or town in this Union had no bigger or healthier brains than the workingmen of to-day; but if each of them had imagined he could do but one kind of work, the map of our country would not look as it does now. Any of these men considered himself equal to taking a hand at building houses, clearing land, shoeing horses, digging post-holes, following the plough, planting corn, tending stock, loading steamboats, acting as deck-hand of a flatboat, carrying mails, or doing whatever else had to be done. They blundered terribly at times, but who did not and who does not? Each new kind of work they laid their hands to sharpened their wits and widened their view of what might be done in the way of getting ahead in the world. That is the reason why trade unions do not flourish in new countries. Men there have been taught by experience to take care of themselves. The common laborer in a new country thinks himself the equal of the judge, the doctor, the lawyer and the railway president. And so he is, so far as a fair impulse and a fair show can make one man equal to another in the race for life.
It is a great pity that representative workingmen in our large cities cannot once in a while be sent on a tour of observation by their respective trade societies. It is the custom of almost every man to regard every one in his own business as about in his own condition. But an observing man going outside of the large cities and the manufacturing towns will quickly be undeceived regarding the possibilities and future of his own business, or of himself, or of any of his associates who have any spirit in them. He may find men of his own specialty doing work longer hours per day and for less money than he is accustomed to get, and they may seem to be having terribly hard times, but there is one significant difference between the two classes: the men in new countries never grumble at whatever their hard times may be. If nature refuses a crop, or makes a river overflow and washes away a town, or a plague of locusts comes upon them, they can grumble quite as badly as any one else. But so far as they have free use of their own wits and their own hands, they “don’t ask nothin’ of nobody,” to use their own emphatic expression.
The mechanic who works all day in the newer countries can seldom be found in the beer-shop at night. He drops into the post-office, or the store, or the office of the justice of the peace, or wherever he sees a crowd of men, or knows that men will congregate, so that he may learn what is going on. He will change his business six times in the week, and then be guilty of doing it twice on Sunday, if there is any money in it. You never know the business of a man in a new country for more than a week at a time, unless you have your eye on him. It may seem awfully stupid to the stranger, but among people where his lot is cast the workingman manages to keep his end up, as the saying is, and the man who attempts to depress that end is dealt with by the individual himself. If a laboring man aggrieved in any of the newer countries were to go to his fellow-workmen for relief, he would be called either a fool or a coward. If he does not like what he is doing he is expected to try something else, just as every one else in the country does. The banker does not restrict himself to one single business, or one subdivision of business. Neither does the merchant, or the manufacturer, or any of the few farmers who have become “forehanded.” He does whatever he sees most money in, and he has blind faith in his ability to do it. It may not be the finest variety of finished labor, but that is not found anywhere except in the competitive trades.