if the laboring man doesn’t want to be in a state of slavery, he must refrain from putting himself into chains.
he is a good deal like the rest of us; he always blames somebody else for his condition. he won’t be able to get out of trouble until he lays most of the blame on himself.
if a man feels obliged to enter into business relations with a lion he does not begin by putting his head into the animal’s mouth. if a workingman begins life with the belief, which seems prevalent now, that all employers will enslave a man if they can, he should not allow himself to be in such condition that he cannot take care of himself. why, even a dog or a cat going into a strange room spends its first moments in looking around to see how it can get out again in case of necessity.
employers as a class have so many sins to answer for that there will be lively times for them on judgment day, i suppose, but that is no reason why the employee should be a fool. if a{337}
image not available: agricultural building.
agricultural building.
man sticks a knife into you, and is sent to state’s prison for it, his sentence punishes him, but it does not pay your doctor’s bill, or make up to you what you have lost in time and money while you have been lying in bed under the surgeon’s care.
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{338} 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{339} 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{340} 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{341} 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{342} 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{343} 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.
it should not need any argument to prove all{344} this. there seldom is a great strike at any manufacturing centre during which a large number of the operatives do not disappear. some of them find work elsewhere in their own specialty, but the oldest inhabitant, or the village gossip, or some one else who has time to pay close attention to other people’s business, can tell you that some of these men have struck out for themselves in some other direction, and they very seldom are able to tell you that any such change of business has brought unfortunate results. it has already been said in this book that some of the great industries of the country to-day are managed by men who once were common laborers.
however ignorant the workingman may be of the fact, or however willing he may be to ignore it, the truth is that the workingman half a century ago was a great deal worse off than his successors to-day. he worked longer hours, he got smaller pay—i mean smaller pay in proportion to the purchasing power of money, and his social position was very bad. even the revolutionary war, the declaration of independence, the rights of man, and all that sort of thing, didn’t break down at once the laws of caste that had come to us from the old country. it was not so very long ago that even the students of harvard university were classified according to their ancestry, the list being led by gentlemen,{345} which was followed by the profession and then brought up by the general assortment of what the late mr. venus called “humans various.”
the apprentice was not only household servant as well as work-boy to his employer, but he was kept in order by a strap or a club, and the law not only could give him no redress for personal abuse, but it recognized the right of the employer to treat his boys in that manner. boys brought up in that way had not much independence when they became men, and the independent spirit of the present generation was a thing almost unknown in the more thickly settled communities at that time. the workingman in that day was more religious than his successors in the present generation, but when he went to church he sat in the poorest seats; generally he sat in the gallery. when he was out of work he went to the poor-house. the poor-house was built especially for people of his kind. perhaps in some of the large cities workingmen and their families go to the poor-house to-day, but most of them will take pains to go to another community than that in which they are known before they allow themselves to be supported in such manner.
the people of the united states cannot afford at any price to support a class which proposes to stay in one spot, making no endeavor to go further or go higher. no grade of society can{346} afford to support such a class. the class itself cannot afford to remain in any such position. allusion has already been made to the willingness of men of the present generation to enslave their fellow-men when they get special opportunity. the methods are not the same as of old, but the fact is the same and the practice is steadily fostered by the inability of a great number of men and women to impress upon the public any ability to be anything better than slaves.
the workingman may take such consolation as there may be in the fact that this rule does not apply to him or to his own class alone. it exists everywhere. there are plenty of business houses who keep their men under their power, body and soul, by a custom, apparently founded on good nature, of lending them money in excess of their earnings. it is a modification of the south american consistado plan, to which allusion has already been made, and it works just as well in new york or chicago, or any other manufacturing centre, as it does in south america. a man who will not spend his earnings in advance if he can get them is pretty hard to find. if this were not so there would be very little of running to banks, by business men, for discounts and loans, and “shaves.” the impulse to discount the future is almost as old as the world itself. it dates all the way back to{347} the garden of eden, when our first parents began to devour some fruit which they were not yet entitled to.
it may be that slavery sometimes is pleasant. indeed, it often is. in spite of all the bad stories that were told about the treatment of the southern blacks during old slavery days, there were a great many plantations from which the slaves did not run away, even after they heard of the emancipation proclamation, and knew, from what they heard in the dining-room and parlor, that the south was on its last legs, and that the good old times could not possibly come back again. there were many plantations found by the union army, during its tramps through certain states, which the masters and the mistresses had abandoned, but to which the colored people clung closely, from old association alone, and were found there when the owners came back again. slavery exists still in many portions of the world, principally eastern countries, and europeans of high character and close observation have declared that the condition does not inflict cruel or unfair burdens upon the enslaved.
but this is a free country. all our institutions are based upon the theory that one man is just as good as another, and not only so, but that he ought to be expected to be as good as his neighbors, and that as soon as he ceases to be an{348} independent being, the master of his own time and of his own family, including all their interests, he is not equal to his duties and responsibilities as a citizen. we hear a great deal about votes purchased for money and whiskey and offers of office; but does any one realize how entirely the political status of certain states and counties and towns depends upon the opinions of even the temporary whims of certain large employers? there are thousands of men in each of at least three new england states who would not dare vote any way than they are requested to do by their employers. fac-similes of cards and written notices have been printed to show that in certain mills the proprietors announced that their operatives were expected to vote for certain candidates which were named. if an american, an inhabitant of the freest country of the world, cannot vote as he pleases, what does his personal liberty amount to? even a tramp has a right to his own vote, or to sell it to the highest bidder, if he has been long enough a resident of the locality in which he attempts to deposit his ballot. there are slaves in banks and mercantile houses as well as in manufacturing establishments, so the laboring man need not feel hurt at the intimation that he is in danger of being subjected to an involuntary servitude which not only will control his time, but also his mind, to such an extent that he is not a free{349} agent in anything regarding moral opinion or his duties as a citizen.
the principal outlet for the energies of the workingman at the present time is undoubtedly in the newer parts of the country. there is where he is almost sure to be found if he is a man of proper spirit and has not handicapped himself so it is impossible for him to reach there. this outlet will be practicable for at least a generation to come. we hear a great deal about the new countries being filled up and there being no chance for a man any longer, but some thousands of men who have footed it half-way across the continent can tell us differently, and show substantial proofs that they are right.
the man who resolves not to take any heavy responsibilities upon his time or pocket until he considers himself fairly settled in life, can always make his way to the new country, and there in no part of this land, although it is not a land flowing with milk and honey, in which he cannot find something to do. i once was made curious, by the conversation of a number of workingmen in a large pork-packing establishment in a small town in the west, to know where they had come from, and what their previous occupation had been, and among twenty-seven men i found twenty-one businesses and professions represented, not one of which was pork-packing. nevertheless each of these men was{350} earning two dollars and a half a day, and keeping an eye open for something better, which i am happy to say i saw some of them realize within a few months. at that very time at least one-half of the trades which these men had originally learned, and in which they were all supposed to be experts, were languishing in the east, and a great number of those engaged in them were in that desperate condition of mind that in other countries has often precipitated riots and brought about bloodshed and prolonged disorder.
but—let workingmen note the distinction—only two of these twenty-seven men were already married. what they had earned already was their own. they were able to move about from place to place until they found a satisfactory opening in life. some of them afterward went to the dogs. it is impossible to find any lot of men together by chance in which there will not be some incompetents and some who, through one failing or other, would be their own enemies if they were in the best of hands. there were only twelve men in the first company of assistants organized by jesus christ, and one of them turned out to be a scoundrel in spite of the excellent company in which he found himself.