THE Cl 
 THE 
 
 JONATHAN
 
 THE CITY OF THE 
 DINNER-PAIL
 
 THE CITY OF 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 
 
 BY 
 
 JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 (be Ritocrsibe press ambrib0e 
 
 1909
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY JONATHAN THAYXR LINCOLN 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published September IQOQ 
 
 BOf.TON PUtLiC t*RA*f 
 EX.
 
 -* - 
 
 oP SALIFO 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 TO MY WIFE
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. The City of the Dinner-Pail I 
 
 II. The Average Citizen and the Labor Prob- 
 lem 37 
 
 III. The Man and the Machine 63 
 
 IV. The Time-Clock 95 
 V. Trade-Unionism and the Individual Worker 123 
 
 VI. The City of Luxury 157 
 
 ** These chapters first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The 
 Outlook, and are here reprinted by permission of the publishers of those 
 magazines. 
 
 i t[ . L
 
 I 
 
 THE CITY OF THE DINNER-PAIL
 
 THE CITY OF THE 
 DINNER-PAIL 
 
 THERE are cities in America nearly if 
 not quite as cosmopolitan in popula- 
 tion as Fall River, the City of the Dinner- 
 Pail, I like to call it, but none in which 
 the people of many lands are so intimately 
 associated in their daily lives; for the in- 
 dustry of this manufacturing community is 
 not diversified, there is no opportunity for 
 the people of different ancestry to follow 
 this or that occupation they must all 
 make cotton cloth or perish ; and so it is that 
 the children of Shem, Ham, and Japheth 
 live and toil side by side. There are nearly 
 one hundred cotton factories in the City of 
 the Dinner-Pail, operated by half as many 
 corporations. Over three million spindles 
 and nearly one hundred thousand looms 
 whir and clatter within the granite walls of
 
 4 THE CITY OF 
 
 the factories, and from daylight until dark 
 nearly thirty thousand men and women earn 
 their daily bread making cotton cloth. 
 
 Years ago thrifty New England folk built 
 mills along the wooded banks of the river 
 which furnished power for the machinery, 
 and less successful New England folk oper- 
 ated the spinning-frames and looms. The 
 factories were small, and the city then was 
 nothing more than a little manufacturing 
 town. As the cotton industry developed, 
 the village grew; newer and larger facto- 
 ries were built ; English and Irish workers 
 came, then French Canadians, and finally 
 Portuguese and Italians, Armenians and 
 Russians, Polanders, Swedes, Norwegians, 
 the people of every race and language. 
 The city now numbers one hundred and 
 twenty thousand souls, and is the centre of 
 one of the greatest industries in the country. 
 There are those who shun the City of the 
 Dinner-Pail as if it were the City of Dread- 
 ful Night; they gather their skirts about
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 5 
 
 them and pass it by, little knowing the vast- 
 ness of its human interest, little dreaming 
 of the poetry that lies beneath the smoke 
 pouring from the factory chimneys. 
 
 Fortune has never been kinder to me 
 than on the Sunday morning when I first 
 went to service at St. John's Church, in the 
 City of the Dinner-Pail. I was a very young 
 man then, but one year out of college, and 
 just commencing business. At the univer- 
 sity I had formed many friendships, and 
 had become, by some kindly chance, one 
 of a little company of men, slightly older 
 than myself, living in Boston an inter- 
 esting literary group; all clever men, and 
 some of undoubted though untried genius. 
 Since then one of the number has written 
 some of the sweetest verses in our language; 
 one has made his name familiar to every 
 lover of Gothic architecture ; one has writ- 
 ten essays which to me at least are as sweet 
 and fanciful as those of the gentle Elia; 
 and one has painted pictures of rare beauty.
 
 6 THE CITY OF 
 
 Some have failed, poor chaps, their genius 
 turning out to be mere talent ; and one 
 whose mind was keenest and whose soul 
 was sweetest died before his days of ap- 
 prenticeship were done. We used to meet 
 in an attic over a paint-shop in the heart 
 of the busy city, and discuss with youthful 
 enthusiasm the absorbing problems of the 
 day. We were all idealists, despising Mr. 
 Howells and the writers of his school, 
 while our enthusiasm for George Mere- 
 dith knew no bounds. We were devout 
 followers of the Pre-Raphaelite brother- 
 hood, and worshiped the name of William 
 Morris; we hated the rush and hurry of a 
 commercial age, and railed at "progress" 
 when understood to mean electric cars and 
 telephones in a word, we believed that 
 mankind had been brutalized by machin- 
 ery, and our mission was to preach the 
 gospel of John Ruskin and save America 
 from the hands of the Philistines. 
 
 Returning to the City of the Dinner-
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 7 
 
 Pail, I found myself in a different atmos- 
 phere. Rossetti'sname was nextto unknown; 
 Morris may have been thought of as the in- 
 ventor of a comfortable easy-chair, but not 
 a single Kelmscott book was owned in the 
 city. And as for George Meredith, if one of 
 his novels strayed from its shelf in the Pub- 
 lic Library, it was because some immature 
 young person believed him to be the author 
 of "Lucille." The City of the Dinner-Pail 
 was then, as it is now, the busiest of New 
 England manufacturing towns, a workaday 
 city where no vice was so disgraceful as 
 idleness; where thousands of men and 
 women, yes, and children too, toiled from 
 early morning until nightfall in the facto- 
 ries, earning their daily bread; where the 
 manufacturers themselves worked early and 
 late at their desks, and where the talk even 
 of the home centred on business. 
 
 One day, as I was busy at my desk over 
 a particularly elusive trial balance, a man 
 older than myself by about four years en-
 
 8 THE CITY OF 
 
 tered the office. He was an athletic young 
 fellow, whose face indicated a cheerful, 
 energetic disposition, and his dress marked 
 him as an Episcopal clergyman. His errand 
 was quickly explained. He had remem- 
 bered me as a member of his college so- 
 ciety. His parish was composed of English 
 operatives, and, as the winter had been 
 unusually severe, many of his parishioners 
 were in need. One case particularly inter- 
 ested him, and he asked me to help him 
 find employment for the man. There was 
 a peculiar charm of manner, a mingling of 
 sincerity and good humor, of common sense 
 and enthusiasm, about the rector of St. 
 John's which at once attracted me to him, 
 and led me the next Sunday to accept his 
 cordial invitation to attend service at his 
 church. I found St. John's an unpreten- 
 tious Gothic structure of native granite, 
 situated a mile or more from the centre of 
 the city. There were good lines enough in 
 the building to suggest, in a crude way, some
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 9 
 
 little English parish church ; and, upon en- 
 tering it, the suggestion became complete. 
 I felt myself for a moment in the " old 
 country," and, listening to the responses, 
 heard the dialect of Lancashire. The illu- 
 sion was, however, only for the moment ; 
 with the voices speaking the dialect of a 
 country beyond sea were mingled the nasal 
 tones of New England; for in St. John's 
 parish Yankee sons are begotten of English 
 fathers. The Protestant Episcopal Church 
 is the one heirloom left to us by England, 
 when she officially departed from our shores, 
 which time has altered least. To thousands 
 in our generation it proclaims the message 
 that the splendid history of England is our 
 history too that all her glorious tradi- 
 tions are ours by right of inheritance ; and 
 as I sat in St. John's Church that Sunday 
 morning listening to the responses in which 
 were mingled the dialects of Lancashire 
 and New England, I was alive, as never be- 
 fore, to the grandeur of this heritage. And
 
 io THE CITY OF 
 
 what hearty responses these were! Listening, 
 I understood that the people of St. John's 
 worshiped God with whole hearts. It was 
 hard to realize that these people, devout, 
 single-hearted, enthusiastic in their quest 
 for truth, were the same men and women 
 who, working at the spinning-frame and 
 loom, had so often seemed to be merely 
 the vital part of the machinery. That mo- 
 ment I determined to know them better, 
 and I here record with love and gratitude 
 that many of the happiest hours of my life 
 have been spent in their companionship. 
 When I left St. John's that Sunday morn- 
 ing, I realized that the life about me was 
 not the dismal, sordid thing that fancy had 
 painted it, but, instead, possessed an interest 
 passing the imagination ; and with an un- 
 wonted enthusiasm I sought to find my own 
 place in it. 
 
 At half-past five each morning in the 
 City of the Dinner-Pail the factory bells 
 ring out in merry chorus; only the older
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL u 
 
 factories keep up the custom, but they are 
 so numerous that the bells are heard from 
 one end of the city to the other. On many 
 a dark winter morning the sound of the bells 
 has awakened me to reflect for a moment on 
 the lot of those who "get up by night and 
 dress by yellow candle-light " ; and I have 
 returned to my dreams while already the 
 streets were beginning to be thronged with 
 the army of the dinner-pail. And what a 
 motley army it is which, in the early morn- 
 ing, hurries through the streets to the day's 
 work in the many factories ! It is composed 
 of men and women of every race and lan- 
 guage the greatest numbers, however, 
 being of French, Irish, and English parent- 
 age. 
 
 The French Canadian population, num- 
 bering about thirty-five thousand, is cen- 
 tralized in the eastern part of the city. 
 Walking the streets, one hears French 
 spoken quite as often as English ; boarding- 
 houses bear the sign of " Maison de Pen-
 
 12 THE CITY OF 
 
 sion," while other signs over the shop-doors 
 set forth in French the dealer's wares. High 
 on a hill overlooking the beautiful lakes 
 which skirt the city to the eastward stands 
 Notre Dame College, in which are en- 
 rolled over twelve hundred students, and 
 near the college buildings towers the great 
 church of Notre Dame. In the adjoining 
 streets are the parochial residence, the con- 
 vent, and the schools. Not far away is the 
 office of "L'Independant," a daily paper 
 of no mean circulation, printed in French. 
 In its columns may be found recorded the 
 meetings of such societies as the Ligue des 
 Patriotes, the Garde Napoleon, the Societe 
 de St. Jean Baptiste, and such clubs as the 
 LaurierandLaBoucane, the Cercle Mont- 
 calm, and a score of others. 
 
 As one walks the streets of the French 
 quarter it is hard to believe one's self in a 
 New England city. If one were to enter 
 the houses, this belief would be even more 
 difficult ; here he would find customs very
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 13 
 
 foreign to the soil in which they flourish ; 
 he would hear the affairs of the home dis- 
 cussed in a foreign tongue; he would find 
 no trace of the Puritan traditions deep- 
 rooted in another section of the city among 
 the few thousand of New England descent 
 who dwell there, but, instead, the tradi- 
 tions of a Latin race. While he would find 
 so much that was foreign in suggestion, he 
 would, however, discover, if he looked be- 
 neath the surface, a deep-rooted American- 
 ism ; for these people are loyal citizens of the 
 United States. The French voters who go 
 to the polls take a keen interest in politics ; 
 they influence new immigrants to become 
 naturalized, and, when their papers are 
 received, to exercise the right of suffrage. 
 Here, as in their northern homes, the 
 French Canadians run slight risk of ex- 
 tinction through race suicide, for their fam- 
 ilies are large. I have heard of instances 
 where the children of the same parents 
 numbered more than twenty, and families
 
 14 THE CITY OF 
 
 of twelve and fourteen occasion no com- 
 ment among them. Large families beget 
 either shiftlessness or thrift, and in the pre- 
 sent instance it is the latter which obtains, 
 for thrift is the predominant characteristic 
 in the homes of the French quarter. The 
 French Canadian loves the dollar ; he dreads 
 nothing more than a strike, because a strike 
 enforces idleness, and idleness entails loss 
 of wages. There are no French Canadian 
 labor leaders. 
 
 The Irishman who makes his home in 
 the city is the same Irishman who makes 
 his home everywhere in the land as he 
 himself might state it. There are twenty- 
 five thousand Irish-Americans in the City 
 of the Dinner-Pail ; the ancestors of some 
 came before the first factory was built ; and 
 many an Irish family can claim to be among 
 the oldest in the community. From these 
 families come many of the foremost citi- 
 zens, conspicuous in every profession as 
 well as in every trade and craft. Most of
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 15 
 
 the twenty-five thousand, however, came 
 in recent years : some came yesterday, fresh 
 from the old sod, as green as their emer- 
 ald isle, clad in homespun, and speaking 
 an unintelligible dialect ; but before a de- 
 cade has passed, all will have become en- 
 thusiastic citizens of the great Republic. 
 
 The English operatives, some of whom 
 we have seen at their devotions in St. John's 
 Church, bring with them the customs and 
 traditions of the old country. They give 
 tea-parties at which the guests sing unend- 
 ing ballads to monotonous music; Shrove 
 Tuesday brings the inevitable pancake, 
 Christmas its plum pudding and the Yule 
 log. Perhaps at Christmas-time transplanted 
 traditions are most in evidence, for at this 
 season of the year the hearts of men go out 
 to all mankind, and in the cosmopolitan 
 community each speaks his message in his 
 own tongue, and, as in the day of Pente- 
 cost, each hears the message of the others 
 in his own language. The English trim
 
 1 6 THE CITY OF 
 
 their churches with their own hands it 
 is no meaningless ceremony with them ; 
 they gather the greens and wreathe the 
 holly to welcome the coming of the Christ 
 Child. On Christmas Eve the candles are 
 lighted in many homes, and shine a wel- 
 come through the windows to the wayfarer ; 
 and, best of all, after the midnight service 
 in the church, the waits go about the sleep- 
 ing city no whir of spindles or clatter of 
 loom is then heard singing carols. The 
 voices of the singers ring out on the winter 
 air: 
 
 It came upon the midnight clear, 
 
 That glorious song of old, 
 From angels bending near the earth 
 
 To touch their harps of gold : 
 Peace on the earth, good will to men 
 
 From Heaven's all-gracious King. 
 The world in solemn stillness lay 
 
 To hear the angels sing. 
 
 And those who sing this carol are the same 
 men and women who throughout the year
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 17 
 
 stand beside the spinning-frame and loom 
 in the noisy factories. 
 
 A description even of the Christmas cus- 
 toms of the folk of the many nations who 
 work side by side in the mills would fill 
 many pages; and a volume which should 
 include also a description of the Old World 
 traditions which survive in the family life 
 would be of vital interest to the student of 
 sociology ; for the City of the Dinner-Pail 
 strikingly illustrates the wonderful process 
 of assimilation which is going on through- 
 out our country. Each year immigrants 
 from every nation under heaven come to our 
 shores, and are transformed into loyal citi- 
 zens. It is, happily, not true that the tradi- 
 tions of the old home vanish in a moment 
 as by a miracle ; they remain, slightly modi- 
 fied perhaps, for generations; but they sur- 
 vive in the home, not in the civic life; and 
 the survival of these customs lends a peculiar 
 charm to the study of life among the toilers. 
 
 Some one has facetiously said that
 
 1 8 THE CITY OF 
 
 "American" was spoken at the building 
 of the tower of Babel. Underlying this say- 
 ing is a truth which one can easily under- 
 stand by walking, some Saturday evening, 
 through the main street of the City of the 
 Dinner-Pail. Years ago, when the great 
 city was an insignificant factory town, and 
 all the spindles in operation would not equip 
 the smallest of its many mills to-day; when 
 these spindles were tended by the sons and 
 daughters of farmer-folk, whose grandchil- 
 dren now look pityingly at the operatives 
 returning from the day's work, dinner-pail 
 in hand; when the sight of any of the for- 
 eigners who crowd the streets to-day (the 
 Italian woman, her head surmounted by a 
 huge bundle tied up in a bright shawl ; the 
 pretty French girl, dressed stylishly, if 
 cheaply ; the Portuguese laborer smoking 
 his cigarette; the long-bearded rabbi; the 
 Dominican monk in the garb of his order) 
 would have created a stir of excitement to 
 be talked of for days in the community,
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 19 
 
 years ago it was the custom of the village 
 folk, after their Saturday supper of baked 
 beans and cold corned beef, to go "down 
 street," as the saying was. The shops were 
 open, and thither went the village folk to 
 make the week's purchases, pay the past 
 week's bills, and, if the night were pleasant, 
 leisurely to walk up and down the street. 
 Besides this the village offered meagre pas- 
 time for its people. Nor was there great 
 need for amusement, save on Saturday 
 nights ; for work began at sunrise and ended 
 at sunset, and it was only on the evening 
 before the Sabbath that the good people of 
 the town were inclined to sit up o' nights. 
 When the mills multiplied and the for- 
 eigners came, they, too, took up the custom 
 of going " down street," and this custom has 
 survived until to-day. On other evenings 
 Main Street presents no unusual appearance, 
 but on Saturday night the sidewalks for a 
 distance of half a mile north and south of 
 City Hall the limits of the village street
 
 20 THE CITY OF 
 
 as it was in the old days are crowded with 
 good-natured, laughing men and women. 
 Nowhere in the world, not even on Broad- 
 way or Piccadilly, could we find a crowd 
 more dense. It is interesting to note that 
 this unusually crowded condition is limited 
 to a single mile of sidewalk in the very 
 centre of the city; that the crowding begins 
 at about seven in the evening and ceases 
 at nine, as abruptly as it begins; that the 
 greatest numbers promenade on one side of 
 the street, which must have been the " pro- 
 per side " in the old days; and that the vast 
 throng congested within these narrow lim- 
 its seems bent on no business. The shops 
 are open and are well patronized, but 
 the number of shoppers is insignificant 
 compared with the thousands who walk 
 aimlessly along, an irresistible current of 
 humanity. 
 
 What multitudes of events in every land 
 under heaven have contributed to gather 
 here these men and women of so diverse
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 21 
 
 heritage ! Here are united the strength and 
 vigor of the North, the gentle, careless spirit 
 of the South; here East meets West, and all 
 are welded in a mighty whole. What mean- 
 ing has their presence here to us who seek 
 to understand the "Social Question," who 
 seek to solve the "Labor Problem"? 
 
 The first fact so evident that a specific 
 statement of it seems unnecessary is this : 
 every man and woman making up this 
 throng is a human being, an individual, 
 distinct and different from every other 
 individual that God has created. Evident 
 as is the fact, there is a tendency in our 
 time to neglect its meaning. Our very 
 phraseology when we refer to these work- 
 ing men and women indicates the trend ; we 
 speak of the labor element, the labor vote, 
 the demands of labor, when we mean the 
 workers: the individuals who toil in the 
 factories, the votes of these individual 
 workers, and the demands for better con- 
 ditions of life which these individuals, act-
 
 22 THE CITY OF 
 
 ing with a common impulse, make upon 
 their employers. In the old days "help" 
 was the word used to designate the work- 
 ers, and this difference in language has a 
 deeper significance than at first appears. It 
 means that men and women who in the 
 early days of the factory system helped their 
 employers that is, were associated with 
 them in the manufacture of cotton cloth 
 now sell their labor as they might sell 
 coal and cotton were they dealers in these 
 commodities, and that somehow, in the 
 complicated development of the factory 
 system, the individuality of these workers 
 has been so merged with the great machine 
 of which they are the parts, that in our 
 common speech we fail to make the proper 
 distinction between labor and the laborer, 
 between the commodity and the man who 
 sells the commodity. 
 
 If we were to follow these men and wo- 
 men to the thousand homes to which they 
 will return, we should find these homes
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 23 
 
 far more attractive than the average citizen 
 is prone to think. We should also come to 
 know the workers as individuals, and in our 
 minds separate the commodity from the 
 man who sells the commodity; and, be- 
 coming acquainted with these persons in 
 their homes, we should learn to use dis- 
 crimination in accepting as truth much that 
 is written about them in sensational mag- 
 azine articles, much that is printed in the 
 authoritative-looking volumes of the doc- 
 tors of philosophy. 
 
 In the last generation the factory day 
 began at dawn and ended at nightfall. Then, 
 as now, some workers were contented and 
 some rebellious ; by turns the ten-hour and 
 the eight-hour day were heralded as the 
 dawn of the workingman's hope ; but still 
 some are satisfied and some discontented. 
 In our vain efforts to solve the labor prob- 
 lem we rush from one ineffectual remedy 
 to another, because we are unable to view 
 the problem in its true perspective. If we
 
 24 THE CITY OF 
 
 could follow the men and women who 
 crowd the main street of the City of the 
 Dinner- Pail each Saturday evening, if we 
 could go to their homes, and become ac- 
 quainted with the worker as an individual, 
 many errors that now distort our vision 
 would be corrected. 
 
 At half-past five each morning in the 
 City of the Dinner-Pail the factory bells 
 ring out in merry chorus, and half an hour 
 later the streets are thronged with the army 
 of the dinner-pail, hurrying to the day's 
 work in the factories. Twenty-seven thou- 
 sand men and women make up this host of 
 labor men and women, that is the fact to 
 be remembered. Once in the factory, they 
 will become the vital part of the great 
 machine which annually turns out so many 
 million yards of cotton cloth ; but now, as 
 they hurry to the day's work, we recog- 
 nize in each an individual human soul, 
 separate and distinct from every other. 
 Fearful injustice has been done these men
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 25 
 
 and women by persons with the best in- 
 tentions persons who write books about 
 them, slandering their manhood and their 
 womanhood. This army lives on frugal 
 rations, fights hard, sleeps well, every year 
 advances, never retreats. The social unrest 
 that so many talk about and fear is a healthy 
 unrest it is the sign of social progress. 
 
 Less than a century ago, when the fac- 
 tory bells rang out upon the morning 
 air, what manner of men and women 
 responded to the call ? New England folk, 
 men and women, boys and girls from the 
 neighboring farms. To-day their children 
 own these factories, and the Yankee oper- 
 ative has all but disappeared. The English 
 followed, then the French, not to starve 
 and fail, but to follow the law of human 
 progress. In every generation of these fac- 
 tory-folk men and women appear in whom 
 is embodied the aspiration of the class, the 
 aspiration which underlies the social un- 
 rest. The immediate cause of that unrest
 
 26 THE CITY OF 
 
 may be some condition incident to the 
 factory system, but these immediate" causes 
 are not primal causes; the fundamental 
 cause is inherent in that impulse of the 
 race that compels it to rise from worse to 
 better, from better to best. 
 
 The case of an elderly slasher-tender 
 with whom I am acquainted is an instance 
 of this impulse working in the individual. 
 This man was a Lancashire operative of 
 the class that supplanted the Yankee worker 
 when, in the process of social evolution, 
 the New Englander ceased to tend the ma- 
 chinery in the factories. He and his wife 
 took equal chances with the other opera- 
 tives in the mills, they worked under the 
 same conditions, with equal opportunities, 
 yet they were able to send their children 
 to high school and normal school, and thus 
 the latter became teachers instead of weav- 
 ers ; their grandchildren will go to college, 
 and, alas ! will forget the link that unites 
 them with the toilers. The case of the
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 27 
 
 slasher-tender is not peculiar; there are 
 many hundred such cases in the City of 
 the Dinner-Pail. He is not some meteor- 
 like exception of a man who rises from 
 rail-splitter to President and is used by the 
 preacher as an example with which to 
 exhort listless boys ; he is typical of a phase 
 of the industrial question that the reform- 
 ers have overlooked. 
 
 We see evidences of the working of the 
 law of human progress in classes of toilers, 
 here in the City of the Dinner-Pail, as 
 well as in individuals. Matthew Arnold 
 suggested culture as the antidote for an- 
 archy. Mr. Frederic Harrison and the re- 
 formers laughed at him. " Do something," 
 they cried; "do something; no good can 
 come of dreaming ; culture cannot put food 
 into infants' mouths." Reformers then, as 
 now, were in a hurry. But the poet was 
 wiser than the reformers knew. Here, in 
 the City of the Dinner-Pail, the English 
 replaced the Yankee workers, and French
 
 28 THE CITY OF 
 
 Canadians are replacing the English. The 
 Yankees did not starve, and the English 
 are not starving. The Yankees became 
 manufacturers, they became clerks and mer- 
 chants and doctors and lawyers and teach- 
 ers; and the English are following in the 
 footsteps of the Yankee. Every individual 
 did not rise; thousands failed hopelessly, 
 that is the law, individuals perished, 
 but the type survived, and in surviving ad- 
 vanced. The English replaced the Yankee, 
 and the French are replacing the English, 
 and in the life of the French-Canadian 
 operative I see an evidence of the law of 
 progress working in a way that suggests 
 Matthew Arnold's remedy. 
 
 I have already referred to the great church 
 of Notre Dame, which, surrounded by the 
 college building, the convent, and the 
 schools, stands high on the hill overlook- 
 ing the city. You may say that that minster, 
 the spires of which may be seen for miles 
 about, stands for the power of the Roman
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 29 
 
 Church, and so it does. But it stands for 
 a power mightier still than the ecclesias- 
 tical dominion of the Bishop of Rome ; it 
 stands for the aspiration of the race ; and, 
 in a particular sense, it stands for the law 
 of human progress at work among the 
 French- Canadian operatives. Who built 
 that great church high on the hill over- 
 looking the city ? It was built by French- 
 Canadian operatives, thousands of them, 
 each giving his mite from the meagre 
 wages earned day in and day out, standing 
 beside the spinning-frame and loom. Many 
 hundred thousand dollars in wages is the 
 measure of their sacrifice. The church is 
 built in mighty proportions; the aspira- 
 tion which built it is a mighty aspiration. 
 But if you come to study the building 
 with the eye of an architect, forgetting its 
 real meaning, you will see recorded in its 
 stones the fact that the aspiration, mighty 
 though it be, is at the same time crude and 
 uneducated. Had Ruskin seen that build-
 
 3 o THE CITY OF 
 
 ing, he would have had another argument 
 to show the brutalizing effect of machin- 
 ery. The church is neither classical, nor 
 Gothic, nor Byzantine, nor Egyptian, but 
 a very hodgepodge of every order of archi- 
 tecture in the history of that useful art. 
 But who was the architect? From what 
 class did he spring? From the same class 
 to which belong the men and women who 
 built the church by their sacrifice. And 
 when the building in all its rawness, but 
 in all its vast proportions too, was com- 
 pleted, these same operatives gave again, 
 each his mite, and an Italian painter of 
 great talent some of us believe great gen- 
 ius came to the City of the Dinner-Pail 
 and gave four years of his life to decorat- 
 ing the walls of the church. He painted 
 a series of pictures illustrating the human 
 life of Christ, and in a mighty canvas de- 
 picted the Last Judgment in such a manner 
 as to attract to Notre Dame students of 
 art, who, as they study the picture, forget
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 31 
 
 the crude walls that frame it, forget the 
 noisy city with its whir of spindles and 
 clatter of shuttles, finding here in such an 
 unexpected corner of the world a work of 
 art which raises their souls to the height 
 of vision. In the great church of Notre 
 Dame I see an evidence of the law of pro- 
 gress operating in a class of working peo- 
 ple seeking its end through culture. That 
 the people themselves are unconscious of 
 the law and of the means by which it op- 
 erates does not lessen the force of the law 
 nor deny the means. 
 
 We turn from the individual and the 
 class to the whole community, and here in 
 no less striking manner we see evidences of 
 the law of progress seeking its end through 
 culture. Given a city of one hundred and 
 twenty thousand persons, seven-eighths of 
 them of the operative class, and you would 
 little expect to find that in all those things 
 that make for the higher life of the com- 
 munity this city should have kept pace, nay,
 
 32 THE CITY OF 
 
 even have outstripped, its progress in mate- 
 rial things. Yet such is the case. The first 
 free public library in the world was estab- 
 lished in Boston, and nine years later the 
 City of the Dinner-Pail followed the ex- 
 ample of the Modern Athens. We might 
 look for the first free public library in a 
 great intellectual centre, but we should 
 hardly expect to find the second in a 
 workaday community. The impulse that 
 prompted the establishment of the library 
 in Boston came, without doubt, from those 
 who knew the blessings of the intellectual 
 life and desired to dedicate a great public 
 institution to the advancement of learning. 
 The impulse which led to the establishment 
 of a similar institution in the City of the 
 Dinner-Pail found its source, I believe, in 
 an aspiration that looked beyond the fac- 
 tory walls the fruit of the law of human 
 progress at work among the toilers. 
 
 More natural than the establishment of 
 a public library, perhaps, was the introduc-
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 33 
 
 tion of free text-books in the public schools 
 years before free text-books were required 
 by state law. In a community of wage- 
 earners, where even a small sum spent 
 for books would be a burden to the indi- 
 vidual, it was natural that the municipality 
 should be called upon to bear the burden ; 
 yet at the same time the fact that the com- 
 munity anticipated the law is an evidence 
 of its faith in the value of education, its 
 effort to combat anarchy with culture. 
 More natural still, but nevertheless an evi- 
 dence of the aspiration of its citizens, is the 
 fact that before the law of the state required 
 manual training to be taught in the high 
 schools of all cities of twenty-five thousand 
 inhabitants and over, such a course was 
 made a part of the school curriculum in the 
 City of the Dinner-Pail, while the same 
 community was among the first to establish 
 a free kindergarten and a public training- 
 school for teachers. 
 
 It may be said that all these evidences
 
 34 THE CITY OF 
 
 of a community alive to the blessings of 
 education were due, in the first place, to 
 the sagacity of far-seeing individuals, public 
 servants, themselves educated men and 
 actuated by philanthropic zeal; and in a 
 measure this is so ; but that such individuals 
 should be developed in this workaday city, 
 in the very heart of Philistia, and daily 
 touching elbows with the populace, is the 
 best evidence of that aspiration to which I 
 refer ; and if this fact were not enough to 
 prove the truth of the statement, then the 
 enthusiasm with which the toilers take ad- 
 vantage of these many opportunities opened 
 to them could be cited as conclusive evi- 
 dence. Had there been no free normal 
 school, the slasher-tender's daughters would 
 not have become teachers ; but it was not the 
 training-school that enabled them to live 
 their lives in the schoolroom instead of the 
 factory, it was the law of progress domi- 
 nating the mother's mind, that mother 
 who for so many years tended eight looms
 
 THE DINNER-PAIL 35 
 
 in the noisy weave-room, the unconquer- 
 able desire in the mother's heart to give her 
 children better things than she had known. 
 And again, turning from the individual to 
 the working people as a whole, we find the 
 final evidence. It is no small thing for three 
 thousand operatives, after spending ten and 
 one-half hours at work in the factories, to 
 attend school from seven o'clock until nine 
 in the evening. Yet so they do, not only in 
 the textile school, seeking to increase their 
 efficiency as operatives; not only in the 
 primary and intermediate schools, seek- 
 ing to fulfill the educational requirements 
 of the state law ; but in the evening high 
 school, seeking that culture which is the 
 fulfillment of the law of progress. 
 
 In the introduction to his " History of 
 English Literature" Tainesays: "Neither 
 mythology nor language exist in them- 
 selves ; but only men who arrange words and 
 imagery according to the necessities of their 
 organs and the original bent of their intel-
 
 36 THE DINNER-PAIL 
 
 lects. A dogma is nothing in itself. Look 
 at the people who have made it ; nothing 
 exists except through some individual man ; 
 it is this individual with whom we must be- 
 come acquainted." In just this way, there 
 is no labor problem separate from the men 
 and women who create it. To understand 
 the problem we must know the individuals, 
 and know them as they really are the 
 worker at the loom and in his home, the 
 employer at his desk and in the world of 
 men.
 
 II 
 
 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN AND 
 THE LABOR PROBLEM
 
 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 AND THE LABOR 
 
 PROBLEM 
 
 THE library shelves groan with the 
 weight of books catalogued under the 
 head of "Sociology." Thousands of these 
 volumes deal with what is loosely called 
 "The Social Question," or, what amounts 
 to the same thing, "The Labor Problem." 
 Some of the authors are scholars who have 
 thought deeply along economic lines; some 
 are sensational writers who cry that the rich 
 are growing richer and the poor are grow- 
 ing poorer, and nothing but a revolution 
 can restore the balance. There are also 
 apologists for the present regime, who tell 
 us that, all things considered, the worker 
 has no reason to be discontented; yet the 
 worker is discontented, and the fact must 
 be explained. There is a trend toward
 
 40 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 Socialism in these days, and programmes for 
 municipal ownership are in the air: some 
 reformers would enact laws to forbid, or at 
 least to limit, the inheritance of great for- 
 tunes ; some would level the conditions of 
 rich and poor by a system of graduated tax- 
 ation. A thousand projects are being dis- 
 cussed, any one of which we may be called 
 upon to sanction at the polls, yet the aver- 
 age citizen has but the haziest notion of 
 the social question and the conditions which 
 create it. The average citizen has not read 
 the books upon the library shelves and 
 with reason, as it seems to him. The pon- 
 derous tomes of the doctors of philosophy 
 present a forbidding aspect; he has been 
 told that the volumes written by young 
 ladies engaged in settlement work are not 
 always trustworthy; and he shuns the 
 writing of the reformers in the belief that 
 all such are anarchistic. He has a notion 
 that great fortunes must be tainted; he 
 regrets that thousands of his fellow men go
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 41 
 
 to bed hungry ; and when strikes and lock- 
 outs send up the market price of beef and 
 coal, he believes there is a labor problem. 
 Then he forms his opinion of it from either 
 the yellow or the subsidized press. Poor, 
 perplexed average citizen, if he would come 
 to the City of the Dinner-Pail, walk its 
 streets and enter its factories, he would find 
 the problem stated and discover some prac- 
 tical suggestions toward a solution. 
 
 The writer of this essay is not an econo- 
 mist he is not even a sociologist; he has, 
 however, lived all his days in a manufac- 
 turing community; he has known and 
 admired many persons of great wealth, and 
 he has known and admired many persons 
 who toil from daylight to dark, earning 
 their daily bread in the factories; and he 
 hopes that certain facts that he has learned 
 from these persons maybe of some benefit 
 to the average citizen in his quest for truth. 
 
 Some years ago a reputable review pub- 
 lished a sensational article concerning the
 
 42 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 City of the Dinner-Pail, and the Board of 
 Trade selected a writer to reply to certain 
 statements made in this article which did 
 not seem to square with the truth. It was 
 my good fortune to accompany the coun- 
 sel for the defendant in his tour about the 
 city investigating the charges. The sensa- 
 tional writer had described the tenements 
 in which the operatives lived, and selected 
 for particular criticism a group of houses 
 owned by a prosperous corporation. Such a 
 picture of squalor has seldom been painted 
 evidently the gentleman had never be- 
 fore seen a house without a bath on every 
 floor. These houses were built about a quad- 
 rangle which served as a common back 
 yard, and while this back yard might not be 
 all that Mr. J. Horace McFarland might 
 desire so far as grass and trees are concerned, 
 it was a very large breathing-space, and 
 gave each tenant a right to more out-of- 
 doors than one can hire for several thou- 
 sand dollars on Fifth Avenue. In the centre
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 43 
 
 of the quadrangle were a number of out- 
 houses which caused this diligent student of 
 sociology a bad quarter of an hour, and he 
 wrote a long paragraph about the fearful 
 sanitary conditions of the court, where 
 outhouses were placed close to the bedroom 
 windows. He failed, however, to state the 
 fact that, while the small wooden buildings 
 were originally intended for sanitary pur- 
 poses, they were used at the time he wrote 
 as woodsheds, the tenements having been 
 fitted with modern plumbing many years 
 before. He summed up his case against the 
 quadrangle in these words : " In the centre 
 of all this filth stands a pump." Not only 
 did the noxious odors invite diphtheria and 
 Heaven knows what other fearsome dis- 
 eases, but the tenants drank infected water 
 from a well situated in the courtyard! As 
 a fact, there was a pump in the yard, but the 
 pump was without a handle, for the tenants 
 drank the same water with which the city 
 provided their landlord's table.
 
 44 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 This well illustrates the sensational writ- 
 er's method in dealing with the problem. 
 Every fact stated was true there were 
 outhouses in the quadrangle, and near by 
 there was a pump ; but while the facts were 
 true, the writer's conclusions were false, be- 
 cause, while he told nothing but the truth, 
 he failed to tell the whole truth. 
 
 My friend's reply was quiet in tone and 
 more scholarly in treatment than the paper 
 it contradicted ; but he, like the other au- 
 thor, was a partisan one held a brief for 
 the workingman, the other argued his case 
 for the manufacturer. The counsel for the 
 defendant called attention to the large 
 deposits standing to the credit of working- 
 men in the savings banks : a majority of the 
 depositors in several institutions for savings 
 were factory operatives, and this he cited 
 as evidence that the operatives were well 
 paid and thrifty. While I believe the work- 
 ers in the City of the Dinner-Pail are thrifty 
 and well paid, I want to suggest the danger
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 45 
 
 of drawing such a general conclusion from 
 the evidence. Large bank deposits standing 
 in the names of factory operatives clearly 
 indicate that a healthy financial condition 
 exists among the workers, but do not prove 
 that the average worker earns more than he 
 spends. The fact that many operatives own 
 bank-books merely shows that under exist- 
 ing conditions the thrifty worker may save 
 money. To ascertain the exact meaning of 
 the deposits argument it would be neces- 
 sary to know the aggregate of the deposits 
 and the number of depositors, and to classify 
 the workers as to the amount of wages they 
 actually earn ; this in itself would require 
 the attention of one student for a consid- 
 erable time. It is as unfair to take the thrifty, 
 self-denying workingman as the type as it 
 is to set up the hungry, depraved wretch as 
 the inevitable result of the factory system ; 
 for the workingman is, after all, merely a 
 human being, an individual distinct and dif- 
 ferent from every other, and whether he
 
 46 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 lives in squalor or in comfort depends, in a 
 larger measure than we are wont to think, 
 upon himself; and his well-being on his 
 obedience to greater laws than legislatures 
 can enact. 
 
 At the railway station one morning I 
 met an army of immigrants just arrived: 
 one hundred and sixty Western Islanders, 
 men, women, and children seeking a new 
 home on this continent. Had I journeyed 
 to the Azores, outside the principal ports I 
 should have had difficulty in finding so great 
 a crowd of natives ; yet here, within a mile 
 of my own hearthstone, I was to all pur- 
 poses in Fayal. It was by no means the 
 ragged mob the sensational writer would 
 have painted it, but a laughing, interested 
 crowd of men and women getting their first 
 impressions of a strange country. It was a 
 healthy unrest which sent them wayfaring 
 the hope to better their condition; 
 friends had come before them and sent back 
 word that America was indeed the land of
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 47 
 
 promise; following their example, these 
 men and women had become wayfarers, 
 and here they were, expectant of a new 
 hope. Some will achieve that hope and 
 some will fail, but the achievement or the 
 failure will rest with the individual. 
 
 The sensational writer would view this 
 company with dismay another regiment 
 to be mowed down by the machine guns 
 of capital; the apologist would point to their 
 happy, interested faces and tell you the joy 
 of their quest, and how much better it is 
 to run eight looms all day and have the 
 evenings to one's self than to till the bar- 
 ren soil of an island in the sea ; and each 
 writer would fall wide of the mark. Some 
 among this company will be successful, 
 some will fail, and so they would had they 
 remained at home; some have increased 
 their chance of happiness in the broader 
 life of the New World, the others have in- 
 creased the penalty of failure ; but the suc- 
 cess or failure, the happiness or discontent,
 
 48 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 will rest with the individual, and cannot be 
 created by act of legislature. 
 
 A lad of seventeen, who for several years 
 had worked at doffing in a cotton-mill, 
 obtained a position as office-boy in another 
 manufacturing concern. He was a keen, 
 energetic young fellow, and his employer, 
 ever in search of such boys to strengthen 
 his organization when they should become 
 men, took an unusual interest in the new- 
 comer. One morning he noticed the boy 
 engaged in footing up the columns of an 
 old pay-sheet. The task seemed a useless 
 one, and the employer asked the boy why 
 he did it. The boy replied that, having no 
 other work, he had asked the bookkeeper 
 for the sheet that he might verify it, for 
 the benefit of the practice. His employer, 
 pleased with the reply, explained to him 
 how eagerly men in business sought for 
 boys of serious purpose, and commended 
 the lad for his diligence. The boy, hesitat- 
 ing at first, but encouraged by his employ-
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 49 
 
 er's interest, said, "I have wanted to tell 
 you, sir, for a long time, how my ideas about 
 rich men have changed since I left the mill. 
 The men I worked with there were Social- 
 ists, and they said rich men had no hearts. 
 I had never known a rich man, and when I 
 came here I was afraid every time I made a 
 mistake that I should get a beating. The 
 first time I was sent to your private office 
 you spoke kindly to me, and I went home 
 that night and told my mother that rich 
 men were sometimes just as kind as the 
 poor/' 
 
 This is a true story, and what a fearful con- 
 dition it illustrates a working boy aston- 
 ished that his employer could be kind! The 
 solution of the labor problem lies in simpler 
 means than we imagine ; we fret and fume 
 about this and that enactment of law, while 
 the real solution lies beyond the province 
 of legislatures, but within the scope of each 
 man's life a fuller understanding of the 
 lives of those we meet and talk with and
 
 50 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 pass by each day. There exists a deplorable 
 ignorance on the part of the smug and com- 
 fortable concerning the lives of those who 
 toil, and a similar ignorance obtains among 
 the workers concerning those who employ 
 them. 
 
 When I was a boy playing about my 
 father's machine-shop, I watched a man 
 boring castings, and to-day I saw the same 
 man working on the same machine, and 
 still boring holes. What a text this might 
 give the pessimist for his sermon : how he 
 would picture the despair of this man's life, 
 and what an arraignment he would make of 
 the factory system ! Yet if he knew the man 
 as I have come to know him, he would find 
 him to be just another mortal on his certain 
 journey from the cradle to the grave. He 
 is a great gentleman in his own set, this 
 borer of holes, and in the past quarter of a 
 century has saved from his wages what his 
 shopmates deem quite a fortune. He goes 
 to church every Sunday with his daughter,
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 51 
 
 a college girl, in whose education he takes 
 a pardonable pride. He is a philosopher 
 withal ; he has looked out upon the world, 
 and it has meant something to him. He 
 owns the house in which he lives, and be- 
 lieves that there should be a property quali- 
 fication for voters. He tells me that it is 
 a mistake for a man never to take a vaca- 
 tion, and every year he goes to New York 
 for a week, to correct his perspective. Some- 
 times in the summer he goes to Newport 
 for a day, but he does not approve of the 
 summer capital the residents live to no 
 purpose, they seem bent on killing time. 
 Hours to him are synonymous with dollars, 
 and dollars with the education of children. 
 This workingman, the facts seem to prove, 
 is not the miserable creature the disciples 
 of Mr. Ruskin would have us believe ; and, 
 although his horizon is limited, he has 
 advanced a step beyond the office-boy he 
 knows that his employer may be kind, but 
 he has not learned that the man who gives
 
 52 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 ten thousand dollars to a hospital, and the 
 moment the check is written forgets it, is 
 still capable of self-sacrifice. 
 
 Some fifteen years ago "The Coffee 
 Tavern" was one of the most interesting 
 institutions in the City of the Dinner-Pail. 
 Primarily the purpose of the Tavern was 
 to provide a temperance restaurant for 
 workingmen, and connected with it were 
 rooms for reading and recreation. Soon, 
 however, there came a demand for some- 
 thing more than mere entertainment. Over 
 the games of pool and checkers discussions 
 arose concerning labor and capital, and the 
 men asked for a class in political economy. 
 Thus an educational work was begun 
 which resulted in a few workingmen and 
 a few employers of labor becoming better 
 acquainted. 
 
 The directors of the Tavern, among 
 whom were several large employers of 
 labor, met once a week about the round 
 table which was the one conspicuous orna-
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 53 
 
 ment of the directors' room, the regular 
 dinner was served, and the affairs of the in- 
 stitution were discussed. Incidentally other 
 matters were touched upon, and time out 
 of number the great problem of labor and 
 capital was talked over, from two very dif- 
 ferent points of view, by the workingmen 
 in the main dining-room and the directors 
 seated about the round table. After dinner 
 employer and employee smoked their pipes 
 and played games together, and each re- 
 turned to the factory with a higher regard 
 for the opinions of the other. 
 
 There was a debating club which met at 
 the Tavern on Sunday afternoons, at the 
 meetings of which some speaker, in an 
 address limited to thirty minutes, presented 
 the subject, after which a ruler was passed 
 from hand to hand, the possessor of the 
 talisman being allowed five minutes in 
 which to add to the weight of the speaker's 
 argument or to refute his thesis. The men 
 who debated were workingmen, unedu-
 
 54 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 cated, brutalized, as some writers would 
 have us believe ; yet I have often heard 
 at the Tavern, on Sunday afternoon, de- 
 bates which would have done credit to 
 many a state senate. 
 
 In looking over a file filled with forgot- 
 ten notes concerning the labor problem, I 
 chanced upon a manuscript written several 
 years ago by one Thomas Evans, who signed 
 himself " Justice of the Peace and Old 
 Labor Agitator." It brought to mind the 
 figure of an aged Englishman, a native 
 of Lancashire, rough, unkempt, forceful, 
 but one whose eyes looked out with kind- 
 ness on the world in which he lived. All 
 about him he saw conditions crying for 
 reform; he knew the times were out of 
 joint, and believed with his whole heart 
 that he had been born to set them right. 
 Thomas Evans was a remarkable man; 
 lacking culture, he had the mind of a 
 scholar ; in the manuscript he failed to dot 
 his ;'s and cross his /'s, but his reason-
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 55 
 
 ing was clear and his argument masterful. 
 When I first knew him as a Coffee Tavern 
 debater, he was an old man and down on 
 his luck, as the saying is, despised by the 
 manufacturers for being a labor agitator, 
 hated by the workingmen for conceding 
 the fact that sometimes the capitalist is 
 not in error. He was very poor in worldly 
 goods, but rich in his love for men. Later, 
 some well-meaning gentlemen made it 
 possible for him to spend his last days in 
 a home for aged people, but his stay there 
 was brief: he longed for the activities of a 
 busy world; he preferred poverty with 
 doing to comfort with inaction ; and after 
 a few weeks he left the Home and returned 
 to his attic and the crust of bread. En- 
 feebled by age, he could no longer win even 
 a meagre living; he spent a few weeks in 
 the poorhouse, but then his indomitable 
 will again sent him forth into the world of 
 men, where for a few days he fought his 
 last brave battle. One afternoon his totter-
 
 56 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 ing form appeared in the public square ; a 
 group of idlers gathered about him, and the 
 old agitator made his last harangue. To his 
 hearers it seemed the incoherent mutter- 
 ings of a madman ; the police arrested him, 
 he was adjudged insane, and sent to the 
 asylum, where he died. Thomas Evans, 
 J. P., was buried in a pauper's grave, but 
 his message to mankind can never die ; his 
 life, as the world counts it, was a failure, 
 he died in poverty, but who can tell what 
 influences for the good of man he set in 
 motion? Reading the manuscript, I found 
 many familiar passages, bringing to mind 
 his talks in the Sunday afternoon debates at 
 the Coffee Tavern; and I can suggest the 
 nature of these debates no better than by 
 quoting one or two passages from this essay, 
 entitled" A Common-Sense Sermon on the 
 Labor Problem." 
 
 " Society," he says, " has the wrong 
 notion that statesmen lead public opinion 
 and originate reforms ; but this is merely a
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 57 
 
 political dose for the simples. Statesmen do 
 " not lead public opinion, they folio wit. Re- 
 forms have to germinate and develop among 
 the people themselves ; statesmen are sim- 
 ply the instruments to carry out the col- 
 lective will of a nation, and all legislation 
 that anticipates the will of society must fail. 
 Schoolmasters must sow before statesmen 
 can reap. We hear much said about con- 
 sistency of thought, and in my humble 
 opinion it is a monstrous humbug to call 
 it a moral virtue, because all social progress 
 is the result of changes of opinion. What 
 some people call consistency of thought, 
 common sense tells me is mental stagna- 
 tion. The great question before the country 
 to-day, the labor question, can never be 
 settled by salary-grabbing politicians. We 
 must be Christians first and partisans after- 
 wards. Common sense tells me there can be 
 no political question which is not also a re- 
 ligious question ; and all real progress must 
 be by honest legislation ; such legislation,
 
 58 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 however, will not come until the intelligent 
 and industrious manhood of this country 
 brushes aside the bigotry and prejudice, and 
 learns with Tolstoy that we cannot be saved 
 separately; we must be saved collectively." 
 
 This seems rare common sense, and, com- 
 ing from a workingman, ought to set the 
 smug and comfortable to thinking. The 
 man who reasoned so clearly was not a 
 scholar, I devoted many hours to trans- 
 lating the manuscript, but I will venture 
 that on economic questions he could con- 
 found many a doctor of philosophy. 
 
 Let us look again at the manuscript. " In 
 the saving grace of common sense," he 
 writes, " trades-unionism is not a whit bet- 
 ter off than the world of practical politics. 
 There are surely many political trade-union 
 leaders who trade in official salaries when 
 manhood and true courage are the quali- 
 ties most needed; common sense plainly 
 tells me that all bigots and tyrants are not 
 to be found among the employers of labor.
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 59 
 
 Sectional trades-unions are not wide enough 
 to secure the greatest good for the greatest 
 number, and I have suffered often for daring 
 to oppose many movements which had the 
 support of sectional unions. We have heard 
 a great deal about what trades-unions have 
 done, but few labor leaders can be found 
 with manhood and moral courage to name 
 the cruel wrongs to thousands of helpless 
 and defenseless fellow men and women 
 perpetrated by the selfishness of labor lead- 
 ers looking for political honors." 
 
 This workingman not only could think 
 clearly, but he could reason impartially, and 
 you may seek in vain among the writings 
 of the partisans of capital for a more sting- 
 ing arraignment of trade-unionism than is 
 contained in this manuscript from the pen 
 of the "Old Labor Agitator." Thomas 
 Evans was not the only man 'among the 
 members of the debating club whose opin- 
 ions are worthy of thoughtful considera- 
 tion; there were many other speakers
 
 60 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 
 
 who, if they might be heard by a larger 
 audience, would exert an influence on mod- 
 ern thought. 
 
 The workingmen and the employers of 
 labor who attended these debates at the 
 Coffee Tavern gained for themselves those 
 benefits which an adequate criticism of the 
 labor problem would give to the average 
 citizen a person mightily interested in 
 the question if he only knew it. These men 
 lived with the problem, and their know- 
 ledge came at first hand. No sensational 
 writer could convince them that a revolu- 
 tion was imminent, nor could any apologist 
 blind them to the evils pertaining to our 
 present industrial system. 
 
 What these men knew the average citi- 
 zen needs to know. If he will not read the 
 books upon the library shelves, he may at 
 least look out upon the busy world in which 
 he lives, and try to think for himself con- 
 cerning this vast problem; he can touch 
 elbows with the man who carries the din-
 
 AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 61 
 
 ner-pail, and learn that he is a man and not 
 a machine; he can talk with the man who 
 employs labor, and learn that he is not the 
 inhuman monster the revolutionists would 
 have us believe ; then, having come to know 
 the employer and the employee as they 
 really are, he can set about the task of 
 making them better acquainted.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE MAN AND THE MACHINE
 
 THE MAN AND THE 
 MACHINE 
 
 IN modern manufacturing, economy is 
 the dominant note. The days before the 
 advent of steam and electricity were days of 
 small volume of business and large profits ; 
 but to-day the reverse of this condition 
 obtains, and we find that as a rule the ever- 
 increasing volume of business has been ac- 
 companied by an ever-decreasing percent- 
 age of profits. Competition has reduced the 
 margin of profits to a point where the cost 
 of production must be kept at the mini- 
 mum by every contrivance the manufacturer 
 may invent. 
 
 Labor in its last analysis is a commodity, 
 just as much as cotton, and is subject to the 
 unalterable law of demand and supply; and 
 the manufacturers who in these days of
 
 66 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 keen competition would keep their facto- 
 ries in successful operation, paying to the 
 shareholders a just interest on their invest- 
 ments and at the same time furnishing 
 thousands of workers with the means of 
 earning a livelihood, can pay only the 
 market-price for necessary commodities, 
 whether cotton or labor. At the beginning 
 of the last century the workingman and his 
 employer were to all intents associated in 
 business ; the terms of the partnership may 
 have been unequal, but the relationship 
 between them was practically that which 
 exists in any partnership. With the advent 
 of the factory system came a change, the 
 employer became essentially a buyer, the 
 workingman a seller, of labor. 
 
 Now, while labor is a commodity, like 
 cotton, coal, oil, reeds, harnesses, or any 
 item entering into the cost of production, 
 there is added to it the human element, and 
 from this springs the problem. In our age 
 labor is not only the necessity of the poor,
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 67 
 
 but it is the ideal of the rich. A man may 
 sell cotton at a loss and say, " Never mind ; 
 to-morrow market conditions will change 
 and my loss may return to me as a profit." 
 He may sell coal at a loss and look confi- 
 dently to the future to reimburse him, 
 these things are mere material possessions; 
 but when he sells his labor, that is quite 
 another thing ; for his labor is his own life. 
 That is what manufacturers buy and the 
 multitude of workingmen sell, parts of 
 the lives of men. 
 
 How shall we overcome the conflict be- 
 tween labor and capital ? There is but one 
 way, and that way lies in the recognition of 
 the common humanity of the man who 
 sells and the man who buys labor. 
 
 "Here also," says Carl Hilty, a Swiss 
 thinker, " is the reason why factory labor, 
 and, in short, all mechanical occupation in 
 which one does but a part of the work, 
 gives meagre satisfaction, and why an arti- 
 san who completes his work, or an agricul-
 
 68 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 tural laborer, is, as a rule, much more con- 
 tented than factory operatives, among whom 
 the social discontent of the modern world 
 first uttered itself. The factory workman 
 sees little of the outcome of his work. It is 
 the machine that works, and he is a part of 
 it. He contributes to the making of one 
 little wheel, but he never makes a whole 
 clock, which might be to him his work of 
 art and an achievement worthy of a man." 
 
 I recognize the truth which underlies this 
 view; I recognize the aesthetic value of 
 hand-made things; but I insist that indis- 
 criminate condemnation of machinery is 
 the child of an immature imagination. 
 
 The machine is merely the man multi- 
 plied many times, and to it attaches a spe- 
 cial dignity because it increases the power 
 of the man to accomplish results. Let me 
 illustrate what I mean from the industry 
 with which I am most familiar. The art of 
 making cloth is essentially the same in the 
 great mills in the City of the Dinner-Pail
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 69 
 
 to-day as it was centuries ago, when the 
 first textile fabric was woven. Then the raw 
 material was carded, that is to say, it was 
 cleaned and the fibres laid in a uniform direc- 
 tion by means of a comb in the hand of the 
 carder ; thus the father of Columbus carded 
 wool; to-day huge engines perform the 
 work of the comb, but the carding engine 
 is operated, as was the comb in the old days, 
 by the human hand, only the power of that 
 hand is multiplied many thousand times. In 
 the old days a single spinning-wheel kept 
 one woman employed from daylight to dark, 
 producing less yarn than the dofFers now 
 take in an hour from any one of the thousand 
 spindles tended by a single worker; and in 
 weaving, the power-loom merely repro- 
 duces the identical movements of the hands 
 which wove the first textile fabric before 
 recorded history began. The great steam 
 engine which operates the machinery in the 
 factory is perhaps the best illustration of 
 this idea. A double engine of the triple
 
 7 o MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 expansion Corliss type, indicated at three 
 thousand horse-power, is capable of pro- 
 ducing the power required to raise ninety- 
 nine million pounds to the height of one 
 foot in one minute. How many laborers, 
 think you, would be necessary to accom- 
 plish this tremendous task? And the ma- 
 chine itself is the perfection of mechanical 
 skill: in it is the perfect adaptation of means 
 to the end; it is the visible expression of 
 intellectual as well as physical power, for 
 by it the irresistible forces of nature are 
 controlled and directed by the will of man. 
 One step further. The word " machine " 
 in its first meaning is a contrivance, a 
 means; in its broadest meaning it is any 
 organization by which a desired effect is 
 produced. Thus the whole factory is itself 
 one great machine which the manager 
 operates, as the weaver operates his loom ; 
 and just as the weaver must understand his 
 machine in all its parts, the gears, the 
 pulleys, the shafts, the cams, so must
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 71 
 
 the manager understand his men, who 
 are the gears, the pulleys, the shafts, the 
 cams, of his greater machine. 
 
 As we walk through the factories and 
 observe the operatives standing by their 
 machines, we are liable to confuse the man 
 with the machine, to fail to make the dis- 
 tinction between labor and the laborer, 
 between the commodity and the man who 
 sells the commodity. 
 
 " I have worked on the same machine 
 for twenty years," once said the old slasher- 
 tender, to whom I have already referred, 
 " until I have come to know the machine 
 and the machine to know me." The 
 statement is very suggestive, and the work- 
 ingman who made it had the imagination 
 of a poet. " I have come to know the 
 machine and the machine to know me." 
 In a sense the man does become a part of 
 the machine he operates; and the more 
 he becomes a part of it, the more effective 
 will be his day's work. He becomes a part
 
 72 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 of the machine in that his intelligence ani- 
 mates it, in that he makes himself the mas- 
 ter of his instrument. 
 
 The man who had the imagination to 
 make the statement just quoted was not 
 brutalized by twenty years of labor oper- 
 ating machinery. I know this man in his 
 own home, and I believe that in his daily 
 life he deserves, as few of us do, the name 
 of Christian gentleman ; and his wife, al- 
 though day in and day out for many years 
 she has tended eight looms in a Fall River 
 cotton mill, deserves, as few women I have 
 had the honor to know, the rare title of lady . 
 
 Let us take this man and this woman 
 as types of the brutalized working people, 
 and in their home seek further light con- 
 cerning the problem. The husband came 
 to this country from Lancashire in early 
 manhood, being then by trade, as he is now, 
 a slasher-tender. The wife came to Amer- 
 ica in childhood, attended the public schools 
 until by law she was permitted to work,
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 73 
 
 when she became an eight-loom weaver. 
 After their marriage and a wedding journey 
 from the church to their tenement, they 
 returned to their work, and in the ten or 
 twelve years following, saved enough from 
 their wages to buy a comfortable home, 
 costing perhaps three thousand dollars, and 
 had in the savings banks a balance suffi- 
 cient to make it seem to them that the 
 wife might with prudence leave her looms 
 in the noisy weave-room and devote her 
 time to her home and the two daughters, 
 for whom she had the ambition that they 
 might receive an education which would 
 remove them beyond the walls of a factory. 
 Her life of comparative ease was brief, for 
 within two years another child was born ; 
 and after a time, fearing that the added 
 expense of bringing up the newcomer 
 endangered the fulfillment of her ambition 
 to educate her daughters, she returned to 
 the factory, and remained there until she 
 had made her vision a reality.
 
 74 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 This is but one of many similar instances 
 which have come under my personal obser- 
 vation. I am not familiar enough with the 
 man with the hoe to venture an opinion, 
 but as regards the man who operates the 
 machine, I cannot believe that he stands 
 bowed by the weight of centuries, or that 
 the influence of the machine in itself is 
 brutalizing. There is much in the modern 
 factory system that is brutalizing, and re- 
 forms are necessary. These reforms can 
 come only when the man who buys labor 
 learns that he who sells labor is a human 
 being like himself, and when the employee 
 comes to the realization that his master is not 
 a monster whose one thought is to grind the 
 workingman under his feet. Laws may be 
 enacted should be enacted; but before 
 they can avail greatly, a better social un- 
 derstanding must exist between the man 
 who buys and the man who sells labor. 
 
 We have seen that labor is a commodity, 
 just as any other necessity which enters into
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 75 
 
 the cost of production is a commodity; but 
 there is added to it the human element, and 
 this makes the buying of it the most diffi- 
 cult task which confronts the manufacturer. 
 The manager of a cotton mill buys cot- 
 ton, and nobody is interested except himself 
 and the broker who sells it ; he buys coal, 
 and nobody cares about the terms of the 
 trade except himself and the dealer who 
 sells it; but when he buys labor, not only 
 does his trade mean much to him, much 
 to the few hundred individuals with whom 
 he makes his bargain, but it means much 
 to the whole army of the dinner-pail, which 
 daily answers to the rollcall in all the fac- 
 tories throughout the land. 
 
 Let us now inquire more specifically into 
 the problem, and see how, outside any ap- 
 peal to law, a better understanding may be 
 brought about between the man who buys 
 and the man who sells labor. To this end 
 we may take a concrete example. There 
 exists to my own knowledge one factory,
 
 76 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 which for half a century has exemplified 
 in its management the ideal for which I 
 am contending. It is a small concern, em- 
 ploying at the most not more than three 
 hundred hands. The superintendent knows 
 each of his men personally ; he talks with 
 them about the things nearest to them, the 
 little happenings in their home life, which 
 are to them as dear as are the joys and sor- 
 rows which lighten or make dark his own 
 fireside. In event of an accident to any of 
 them, the doctor's bills are paid and their 
 places held for them until their recovery. 
 In the fifty years of this corporation's his- 
 tory, it has been called upon to defend in 
 court but one tort case, and that brought 
 by a miserable fellow with an illustrious 
 criminal record, who tempted Providence 
 to crown it by perjuring himself to obtain 
 a few dollars from those who for twenty 
 years had befriended him . In the fifty years 
 of the history of this corporation there has 
 occurred but one strike, brought about by
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 77 
 
 walking delegates who knew nothing of 
 the conditions which obtained there; and 
 that strike lasted but seven days, when the 
 men returned in a body under the condi- 
 tions which had previously existed. 
 
 The method here employed may be called 
 Utopian, but the results prove it to be prac- 
 tical. At the same time, the two incidents 
 cited illustrate the difficulties which the 
 manufacturer encounters in establishing a 
 better social understanding with the work- 
 ingman. The man who sells labor, as a 
 rule, misunderstands his employer quite as 
 often as the manufacturer misunderstands 
 him. He fails to realize that his employer 
 is a human being, endowed with an im- 
 mortal soul, who has the welfare of his 
 employees at heart; he fears the Greeks 
 bearing gifts, and cannot understand that 
 the man who buys labor may act from an 
 altruistic motive. He often assumes the 
 same attitude toward his employer which 
 he fancies that his employer holds toward
 
 78 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 him, and he makes the meanest, the most 
 selfish motives the basis of his trade. In my 
 personal experience, the man who is most 
 thoroughly hated by his employees is the 
 man who has the physical, mental, and 
 spiritual welfare of his workingmen most 
 at heart. 
 
 I can imagine some will say that, grant- 
 ing all I have claimed for the corporation 
 referred to, nevertheless it employs but a 
 handful of men, and when we attempt to 
 apply the same methods in a great corpora- 
 tion, employing thousands, we face a differ- 
 ent problem. Here neither the manager, 
 the superintendent, nor the overseer can 
 know personally each man in his employ. 
 This is indeed true ; but the manager can 
 claim from all the men in his employ the 
 same loyalty, the same devotion, which the 
 great general commands from his troops. 
 There is in the City of the Dinner-Pail a 
 man who employs as many thousand oper- 
 atives as the corporation we have referre4
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 79 
 
 to employs hundreds ; yet with him the 
 same conditions obtain, and the explana- 
 tion is the one I have suggested, this 
 man possesses the essential qualities of a 
 great general. 
 
 If thefactory be a small one, giving work 
 to a hundred men, the manager may know 
 each personally ; but if it be a large one, so 
 that such personal acquaintance is imprac- 
 ticable, he may know them as a general 
 knows his army, he may inspire them, 
 if he be a great man, with his own spirit. 
 But, says the doubtful one, this offscouring 
 of the world, these men akin only to brutes, 
 will not respond to leadership. Said Emer- 
 son, "What a force was coiled up in the 
 skull of Napoleon! Of the sixty thousand 
 men making his army at Eylau, it seems 
 some thirty thousand were thieves and 
 burglars. The men whom in peaceful com- 
 munities we hold with iron at their legs, in 
 prisons, under the muskets of sentinels, 
 this man dealt with hand to hand, dragged
 
 8o MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 them to their duty, and won his victories 
 by their bayonets.'* Do you believe that, 
 after the victory, those thirty thousand men 
 thought as thieves and burglars, or needed 
 to be held in irons ? And again, bowed as 
 low by the weight of centuries as the pes- 
 simist would have us believe these men to 
 be, still are they men capable of infinite 
 development, animated with the mighty 
 impulse which compels the race to rise 
 from worst to better, from better to best. 
 The relation of the man of business to 
 the thousands in his employ is in a measure 
 comparable with the relation which ex- 
 isted in another time between the feudal 
 lord and his retainers. The retainers served 
 their master in the great game of war ; to- 
 day the workingman serves his master in 
 the great game of business ; but with this 
 difference loyalty was the ideal of service 
 in the one ; in hatred does the other serve. 
 To accomplish the highest results in the 
 commercial regime, loyalty must be engen-
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 81 
 
 dered in the soul of the operative. This 
 cannot be accomplished in a day, it must be 
 the result of slow but certain growth based 
 on a recognition of the common humanity 
 of the man who buys and the man who sells 
 labor. The feudal lord and his retainers 
 understood one another because they fought 
 in the same cause, faced side by side the 
 same physical peril, used the same weapons. 
 At the end of the battle master and man 
 sought the gift of sleep in the same camp. 
 They were comrades. It is not so to-day ; 
 the master fights for power, the man for 
 his daily bread ; the master fights with his 
 mind, the man with his body; one sleeps 
 in restless misery in his mansion, the other 
 sleeps in discontent in his tenement. 
 
 Let us now take a purely practical stand- 
 point and look at some of the facts concern- 
 ing a great strike in the textile world, which 
 for five months prostrated an industry re- 
 presenting a capitalization of fifty million 
 dollars, condemned to idleness twenty-seven
 
 82 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 thousand operatives, and filled with misery 
 and discontent a city of one hundred and 
 twenty thousand persons. 
 
 The strike was brought on by a cut- 
 down in wages of twelve and one-half 
 per cent. At the time, the manufacturers 
 were at their wits' end in an attempt to 
 operate the factories without a loss of profit 
 in competition with Southern mills, which 
 then enjoyed a temporary advantage in 
 cheapness of labor, then, as now, unorgan- 
 ized. It is due to the secretaries of the tex- 
 tile unions to say that they opposed a strike, 
 as the conditions pointed to certain victory 
 for the manufacturers. In the excitement 
 of the moment, hatred, resentment, preju- 
 dice, prevailed, and the unions voted to quit 
 work unless the old schedule of wages was 
 restored. The condition was impossible, the 
 manufacturers justly made no concession, 
 and the long strike ensued. 
 
 A suggestive fact should here be noted : 
 the labor leaders opposed the strike, the
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 83 
 
 sentiment of the majority of workers was 
 against resistance, for but twenty-five hun- 
 dred out of twenty-seven thousand opera- 
 tives voted at the meetings of the unions ; 
 yet a handful of enthusiasts, self-willed, un- 
 mindful of the common welfare, brought 
 about by their votes a calamity the evil 
 results of which lasted many years. 
 
 The question may rightly be asked, how 
 did it happen, when the strike did not 
 meet with the approval of the labor leaders 
 and was unpopular with the mass of the 
 workers, that it endured through so many 
 months of bitter hardship ? Why did men 
 and women whose better judgment rebelled 
 against an unavailing strike accept its con- 
 ditions and make no concerted effort to 
 terminate it ? There are many reasons, but 
 the main motive, I believe, was an unrea- 
 soning loyalty to the unions as embodying 
 the ideal of the rights of the workingman. 
 The authorities at Washington may declare 
 what we deem an unrighteous war; but
 
 84 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 when the drum beats and the call comes 
 for volunteers, we are ready to offer our lives 
 in the service of our country, the indi- 
 vidual sacrifices himself to the common 
 cause. The strike was declared by a small 
 majority of votes cast by twenty-five hun- 
 dred men and women assembled at the 
 meetings of the unions; yet twenty-seven 
 thousand acquiesced in the result. 
 
 This fact illustrates the power of the 
 unions both for good and evil, and enforces 
 the value of that ideal of loyalty to which I 
 have alluded. The power of labor unions 
 rests in the loyalty not only of the mem- 
 bers, but of all working people, to the ideal 
 which underlies the unions the dignity 
 of labor the sacredness of the day's work. 
 The fact that every workingman may not 
 realize that he is loyal to an ideal does not 
 alter the fact he is loyal, and his loyalty 
 underlies his every act. This loyalty gives 
 a power to the unions which cannot be com- 
 puted in terms of the commercial world ;
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 85 
 
 it is the motive, however, animating a force 
 which the commercial world must recog- 
 nize and direct with judgment. 
 
 The power of unions is unlimited, and 
 may be used to the physical, mental, and 
 moral advancement of the workingman, or 
 it maybe directed to his destruction ; it may 
 serve the advancement of mankind, or it 
 may retard the increasing purpose of the 
 ages. The' need of labor unions, as the need 
 of a nation, is for intelligent leadership. 
 The power is there, who shall direct it? 
 Steam existed countless ages before Watts, 
 electricity before Marconi flashed his first 
 message through miles of unresisting space ; 
 yet ages of men and women watched the 
 steam pouring from countless teapots, 
 and rubbed amber for an evening's amuse- 
 ment, before the master came to make these 
 forces the willing servants of mankind. 
 
 Allow me to intrude myself to the ex- 
 tent of presenting my personal impressions 
 of the great strike, first explaining my
 
 86 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 individual relation to the employers and 
 employees. In a small way I am directly 
 an employer of labor, the machine-shops 
 to which I give my daily attention employ 
 perhaps three hundred hands; the cotton 
 factories in the management of which I 
 am indirectly associated, several thousand. 
 From apurely commercial standpoint, then, 
 my bias should have been toward the 
 welfare of the manufacturers. For fifteen 
 years, however, I have been associated with 
 St. John's parish, composed of Lancashire 
 working people and their American chil- 
 dren. My association with them has been 
 as intimate as my association with the man- 
 ufacturers ; perhaps more intimate, because 
 the less highly organized the social devel- 
 opment, the greater the possibility of inti- 
 mate relations. I have had the honor of 
 officiating as best man at the wedding of an 
 employee, of serving, in the absence of a 
 clergyman, at the burial of a workingman's 
 child, of holding the hand of a laborer in
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 87 
 
 his last hour of life ; and if I have any mes- 
 sage relating to the labor problem, it is 
 this, the values of life are relative, and 
 be the man born to wealth or poverty, his 
 instincts and emotions are the same. 
 
 The great strike was declared; labor 
 faced capital in open battle ; market con- 
 ditions proclaimed that the cause of labor 
 was lost; capital would suffer greatly, but 
 in the end would be victorious because in 
 this instance its cause was just. Twenty- 
 seven thousand men and women were out 
 on a strike ; this number included the peo- 
 ple of all nations, English and French, 
 Irish, Portuguese, Italians, Poles, and Jews ; 
 men and women whom the smug and com- 
 fortable term the offscouring of Europe. 
 You might have expected a demonstration 
 of force from this army ; but when at day- 
 light the engines turned over in the deserted 
 factories,andthefew workers, either without 
 loyalty to an ideal or possessed with keener 
 vision than their fellows, answered the
 
 88 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 summons of the bells, beyond a few broken 
 windows, there were no evidences of vio- 
 lence. Later in the day the streets of the 
 city presented no unusual sights, except 
 that they were more crowded, as on a holi- 
 day. Men and women, who under nor- 
 mal conditions would have been standing 
 by their machines increasing the wealth 
 of a nation, stood gazing into shop win- 
 dows enjoying a leisure unknown for years. 
 Here and there little groups gathered about 
 one more earnest than his fellows, who 
 harangued a listless audience concerning 
 the rights of man. At nightfall the crowd 
 dispersed, and a stranger could have found 
 no evidences that a great battle was being 
 waged in the city. 
 
 In a few days mass-meetings were held 
 in the theatre, at which speeches were 
 made by men conspicuous in the labor 
 movement, urging the workers to be true 
 to the cause, but still no violence. The 
 workers were self-contained, confident of
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 89 
 
 victory. Only once was there an occurrence 
 suggesting public disorder. This happened 
 after weeks of resistance, when the hard- 
 ships of the battle had become well-nigh 
 unendurable. At the close of a mass-meet- 
 ing a weaver, braver than his fellows, spoke 
 the truth, his motive being the common 
 good. He had the intelligence to under- 
 stand the situation, the vision to see that 
 the existing conditions pointed to certain 
 defeat for the labor cause ; he had the cour- 
 age of his convictions and spoke his mind. 
 In a moment the meeting was in an uproar, 
 and a mob followed the man of convictions 
 through the main street. The man was 
 rescued by the police, and the crowd dis- 
 persed. The next day he returned to his 
 looms, and a few followed him. To-day 
 his name is a name of reproach in the City 
 of the Dinner-Pail; but his little service to 
 the cause of labor will live always. 
 
 While the workers were holding mass- 
 meetings, striving by every ingenuity to
 
 9 o MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 maintain a lost cause, the representatives 
 of capital were immersed in the endeavor 
 to start the factories, to supplant in a thou- 
 sand homes want with plenty, despair with 
 hope. They fancied the workingman to 
 be their enemy, they fought selfishly, as did 
 their opponents; but in this instance they 
 fought in the cause of right. Physical suf- 
 fering was the lot of the laborer, cold, 
 hunger, pain. Mental stress was the lot of 
 the manufacturer, the determined effort 
 to achieve, the terror of defeated hope, 
 defeated ambition. Recognition of one 
 fundamental fact would have relieved in a 
 moment all this bodily suffering and men- 
 tal stress, the fact that whatever condi- 
 tions benefit capital must benefit labor as 
 well, and that any measure which, adopted, 
 would be of lasting benefit to the one, must 
 of necessity be of permanent advantage to 
 the other. The forces of labor and the 
 forces of capital waged a fierce battle, yet 
 their interests were identical. Each side
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 91 
 
 suffered hardships, springing from a com- 
 mon cause; the battle fought by capital, 
 rightly analyzed, was not against labor, but 
 against market conditions, and the battle 
 of labor was against the same conditions. 
 If, instead of contending with one another, 
 these two forces had united in the com- 
 mon cause, untold suffering might have 
 been avoided. 
 
 In the end a conference was arranged to 
 be held at the State House, the governor 
 of the commonwealth acting within cer- 
 tain limits as arbitrator. The governor was 
 a manufacturer and a large employer of 
 labor, who, in spite of the fact, was elected 
 to his high office by the enthusiastic sup- 
 port of the labor vote. He exemplified in 
 his relation to his employees an ideal pre- 
 viously suggested. He could not know per- 
 sonally each man and woman in his employ; 
 but his spirit of fair play animated his 
 workers as the spirit of a great general ani- 
 mates his army, and they were ready with
 
 92 MAN AND MACHINE 
 
 their enthusiasm, when the opportunity 
 came, to place him in a position of influ- 
 ence and opportunity. They had for him 
 that loyalty which should exist on the part 
 of all working people toward their em- 
 ployers, and he inspired their loyalty only 
 because his humane attitude toward them 
 compelled their devotion. 
 
 The conference was held in the State 
 House, and the strike was ended. The 
 solution was a simple matter. The margin 
 between the cost of the amount of cotton 
 required to make a cut of cloth and the 
 market price of the same cut of cloth under 
 the old schedule of wages was to be taken 
 as a basis, and wages in the future were to 
 be computed on that basis ; a four per cent 
 advance, representing the margin then ex- 
 isting, was to be made at once, and wages 
 were to vary weekly with the fluctuations 
 of the market. No plan could be devised of 
 greater advantage to the man who bought 
 and the man who sold labor ; both would
 
 MAN AND MACHINE 93 
 
 share alike in the advance or depression of 
 market conditions. A few days after the 
 conference, smoke again poured from the 
 factory chimneys, the whirr of the spin- 
 dles and the ceaseless clatter of shuttles 
 were again joyful sounds within the factory 
 walls ; at the bell hour the army of the din- 
 ner-pail again responded to rollcall, the 
 long strike was ended.
 
 IV 
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 LABOR is a commodity, just as is cot- 
 ton, coal, or any other material making 
 up the cost of production ; but there is 
 added to it the human element, and out of 
 this fact arises the labor problem. This 
 problem includes every question at issue 
 between employer and employee, whether 
 it concerns wages, hours of labor, or san- 
 itary conditions, and, rightly analyzed, is a 
 matter of bargain between the man who 
 buys and the man who sells labor. To 
 understand the labor problem, we must 
 first know something of the factory system 
 which is one source of the present social 
 unrest. 
 
 In the beginning the factory was the 
 creation, not of capital, but of labor ; not 
 of the employer, but of the workingman.
 
 98 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 It was a natural growth out of the home 
 system of manufacture, under which raw 
 material, either bought by the workman 
 himself or given out to him by a second 
 party, was manufactured into the finished 
 product in the home. The transition from 
 the home to the factory system may be 
 studied at first hand in some countries 
 to-day. In Japan, for instance, practically 
 all the spinning of yarn is done in facto- 
 ries, while the larger part of the cloth is 
 made on hand-looms in the homes of the 
 weavers. The first spinning-mill was un- 
 doubtedly built by some thrifty spinner 
 who, obtaining more work than he could 
 well do with his own hands, hired a few 
 less capable workmen to assist him ; after- 
 wards he hired others, until the rooms of 
 his house were too small to contain them 
 and the machinery; then he built a shed 
 devoted to his business, and this shed be- 
 came the first cotton factory in Japan. Our 
 own industrial development has been sim-
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 99 
 
 ilar, and the conditions which we may 
 observe to-day in Japan once existed in 
 America. 
 
 In the early days of the nineteenth 
 century a machinist's apprentice became a 
 journeyman, and received from his master, 
 as was the custom in those days, a new suit 
 of clothes and fifty dollars in money. He 
 left the town in which he lived, and sought 
 employment in a neighboring village, 
 where several cotton-mills had been built. 
 The mill in which he found work would be 
 of interest to one familiar with the great 
 plants of to-day; the owners, the superin- 
 tendent, the workers, were all New England 
 folk, among whom there was no social dis- 
 tinction. Tradition says that the weavers sat 
 in rocking-chairs beside the newly-invented 
 power-looms, and that some brought knit- 
 ting to the mill to occupy their spare time, 
 while others cultivated flowers in window- 
 boxes ; but, rocking-chairs or no, employer 
 and employee began work at the same hour
 
 ioo THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 each morning, returned home at the same 
 hour in the evening, and after they had 
 " washed up' ' and the supper dishes were put 
 away, spent their evenings together. 
 
 The power-loom seemed a marvel of 
 ingenuity to the young machinist; he 
 watched the machines turning out their 
 useful product, and repaired them when 
 they failed to work. Then the thought 
 occurred to him that some day he might 
 build looms and sell them to the cotton 
 factories. He became acquainted with an- 
 other machinist, who had already made a 
 start in this direction, and the two young 
 men formed a partnership, built a small 
 shop, and commenced business. They 
 associated with them a few other machin- 
 ists, and from bell-hour to bell-hour, em- 
 ployers and employees worked side by side 
 at the bench and lathe. The owners of 
 the shop and the men who worked with 
 them were friends and neighbors who went 
 to church and singing school together, and
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 101 
 
 in social life met as equals. In the shop 
 disputes would arise concerning the hours 
 of labor and the amount of work which 
 might reasonably be expected from each 
 man in his twelve hours of daily toil, and 
 these questions were quarreled out in the 
 evening. 
 
 As years went by and the business grew 
 larger, the employers ceased to work at 
 the bench and lathe. One became superin- 
 tendent and devoted his time to overseeing 
 the work of the men; the other became 
 treasurer and attended to financial affairs, 
 keeping the books, buying the iron, selling 
 the machinery, and to other matters inci- 
 dent to the general management ; but this 
 change in occupation did not alter the close 
 personal relation between them and the 
 men in their employ. 
 
 The shop produced a great variety of 
 work, not only power-looms, but steam- 
 engines, turbine water-wheels, machine 
 tools, shafting, hangers, pulleys, and other
 
 102 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 appliances for the transmission of power, 
 hydraulic presses, and, as is impressively 
 stated in an advertisement of the day, " ma- 
 chinery generally." Twenty men working 
 together in the little shop were able to 
 produce this vast array of mechanical de- 
 vices ; but each of these twenty men was a 
 machinist who had served an apprentice- 
 ship of from five to seven years. The worker 
 knew each machine he operated, and could 
 make the machine with his own hands; 
 the age of specialization division of la- 
 bor, it is called in the factory system lay 
 in the future. 
 
 The machinist's son became associated 
 with him in business. He did not learn the 
 trade, for by this time ability in finance 
 was as essential to the success of the con- 
 cern as mechanical skill; and the condi- 
 tions which the son faced were more com- 
 plex than the conditions the father knew ; 
 for the little machine-shop had become a 
 modern manufacturing establishment. The
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 103 
 
 treasurer sat at his desk in the office; the 
 superintendent had his desk, and under him 
 were foremen who were responsible for the 
 several departments of the plant. The tra- 
 ditions of an older day were still vital, a close 
 personal relation existed between employer 
 and employee; but the organization was 
 more complex and the possibility of mis- 
 understanding proportionately increased. 
 Moreover,industrial conditions were chang- 
 ing, competition was becoming keen, the 
 era of small profits and large volume of 
 business was commencing. 
 
 In the later days of the century a grand- 
 son of the machinist sat at the treasurer's 
 desk. His task would have been unimagin- 
 able to the machinist: there were letters 
 to be dictated to a stenographer, not writ- 
 ten out in a bold, round hand ; there were 
 cost-sheets to be examined they had not 
 been so particular as to the costs in the old 
 days ; the market reports had to be studied 
 there were no market reports in the days
 
 104 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 of the machinist. The grandfather once 
 sold a few water-wheels in the Southern 
 States, and made two tedious journeys, much 
 of the way by stage ; the grandson received 
 by mail and telegraph from the South 
 daily inquiries for machinery, and some- 
 times closed the bargain by telephone. 
 Steam and electricity had annihilated dis- 
 tance; the old order had passed, giving 
 place to the new; division of labor be- 
 came a necessity. 
 
 Inside the factory conditions were quite 
 as changed as in the office. One man bored 
 holes, another turned studs, each had his 
 little share to contribute to the finished 
 whole. One hundred men, each making a 
 whole machine, might in a year build one 
 hundred small steam-engines ; but one man 
 could bore many hundred cylinders, and an- 
 other could turn many hundred cranks ; and 
 thus under the changed conditions a hun- 
 dred engines could be built in the time for- 
 merly required to build one. The machin-
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 105 
 
 1st gave seven years of his life to learning 
 his trade : he was taught how to run a lathe, 
 standing before it sometimes fourteen hours 
 a day ; hand and eye were trained by count- 
 less repetition of the same process, until the 
 man and the machine became one; mean- 
 while he had learned to sharpen tools. In 
 a modern shop, tool-sharpening is special- 
 ized : day in and day out men point bits of 
 steel ; but after a time the apprentice knew 
 this trade as well as the best tool-sharpener. 
 Specialization has increased the efficiency 
 of the shop as an organization, but it has 
 decreased the efficiency of the individual 
 worker as a thinking creature. Under the 
 factory system the individuality of the 
 worker is lost in the great organization of 
 which he is a part; officially he has ceased 
 to have a name. 
 
 Much of our industrial discontent arises 
 from the time-clock, or rather from the 
 thought for which the time-clock stands. 
 Wherever the time-clock is in use, each
 
 106 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 worker is known by a number. He pushes 
 a button on the clock door when he com- 
 mences or quits work, setting the mechan- 
 ism in motion ; the gears revolve, a little 
 lever falls and prints in blue or red ink the 
 information that "207-6.59" or "207- 
 7.01"; which means that Christopher 
 Cassidy, a citizen of the United States of 
 America and in the employ of the Union 
 Steel Company, came to the factory that 
 day at one minute before seven, or else that 
 he was one minute late, for which offense 
 the time-keeper is to dock his pay a quar- 
 ter of an hour. Now, while it is quite right 
 to fine a man for being a minute late in 
 getting to his work, if it has become a 
 fixed habit, it is equally wrong to rob 
 him of his name if the crime may be 
 avoided. 
 
 To condemn the use of the time-clock 
 would be absurd, for this ingenious instru- 
 ment has become a necessity in thousands 
 of factories where great numbers of work-
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 107 
 
 ingmen are employed; and no toiler can 
 complain that the record it prints is incor- 
 rect, for when he presses the button he 
 becomes his own time-keeper; yet the 
 relation between the employer and the 
 employee which the time-clock symbolizes 
 is wholly bad. This relation is graphically 
 set forth in a circular I once read, adver- 
 tising these machines. " Do you employ one 
 hundred hands ?" it asked; " do you realize 
 what the loss of five minutes a day by each 
 man means to you in loss of profits in one 
 year? Suppose your average wage is two 
 dollars a day ; fifteen hundred hours at 
 twenty cents an hour. Three hundred dol- 
 lars ! Think of it ! And if you employ a 
 thousand hands your loss will be three 
 thousand dollars. Can you afford this?" 
 
 At first it would seem that the only an- 
 swer to the question must come in the form 
 of an order for clocks ; but upon reflection 
 the employers may reply : " Possibly I can 
 and possibly I cannot. If I consider each
 
 io8 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 man in my employ as a machine which the 
 overseer sets in motion each morning, as 
 the operative starts his loom by pressing 
 the shipper-handle, I cannot afford it. But 
 if I look upon the worker as a man capa- 
 ble of infinite growth, then the three hun- 
 dred or three thousand dollars may be as 
 nothing in my cost of manufacturing. The 
 day does not begin at any given moment. 
 A man may press his button on the time- 
 clock promptly at seven every morning 
 in the year, yet the same man may cheat 
 me out of three hundred hours every twelve 
 months." 
 
 The amount of work which each man 
 accomplishes during the day depends upon 
 other factors than the mere hours of labor ; 
 and the most important of these factors is 
 the spirit in which the work is done. And 
 the spirit of the day's work will depend 
 upon the personal relation which exists be- 
 tween the office and the workshop. If the 
 employer is once known to be interested
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 109 
 
 in the welfare of his men, they will be, 
 more truly than otherwise, his retainers, 
 more zealous for the prosperity of his busi- 
 ness ; but if his relation to them is that of a 
 task-master, they will be his slaves, merely, 
 and quite capable of any treachery. The 
 effort of the employer who would gain the 
 loyal service of his men must be to pre- 
 serve in every way possible the individu- 
 ality of the employee, to emphasize his 
 manhood, and thus to increase his self- 
 respect. 
 
 A friend of mine employs several thou- 
 sand hands in his factories; he is a man 
 who knows from his own experience the 
 meaning of the day's toil, for he worked at 
 the trade in his youth and belongs to that 
 class of "risen workmen" that Shadwell 
 calls hard task-masters. He, however, is a 
 most humane employer. Understanding 
 from experience "time-clock" conditions, 
 and knowing that the industrial value of 
 a man is increased with the belief in the im-
 
 no THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 portance of his own work, this .employer has 
 adopted every means to develop in his em- 
 ployees a sense of their individuality. This 
 is illustrated by the system of fines which 
 is enforced in each department of his 
 works. The man who in a week makes the 
 most imperfect parts, loses a small percent- 
 age of his pay, and his loss goes as a prize 
 to the man who makes the least bad work. 
 In the main office a chained book is hung, 
 and in it are recorded the mistakes made by 
 the clerks ; no penalty is exacted for these 
 mistakes, but each clerk, by reading the 
 record, may profit by the errors of the 
 others ; and it has come to be considered a 
 fearful disgrace for one to have his name 
 entered in the book, so vitally does the plan 
 appeal to the individuality of the employee. 
 This employer also knows that the care of 
 the body is the first step toward developing 
 a sense of self-respect, and he has provided 
 proper bathing facilities for his workers, 
 means for warming the dinners brought to
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK in 
 
 his factory in a thousand dinner-pails, and 
 a playground for field sports on Saturday 
 afternoons ; and he has spent many thousand 
 dollars in improving the sanitary condi- 
 tions of his plants. But, more than this, he 
 is easily accessible to his men. His private 
 office is carefully guarded, for his time is 
 too valuable to be wantonly wasted. I have 
 seen a dozen men sitting outside his door, 
 waiting their turn to be received: trusted 
 representatives of great selling houses; buy- 
 ers of goods seeking to establish business 
 relations with his firm ; perhaps a wealthy 
 philanthropist collecting funds for private 
 charity; and all men of no little conse- 
 quence as viewed by the laborer who dif- 
 fidently enters the office. But this same 
 laborer has but to write his name on a piece 
 of paper, and the busy man promptly re- 
 ceives him so firmly does he cling to that 
 spirit of equality which characterized, in a 
 marked degree, the early days of the factory 
 system.
 
 H2 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 Side by side with the industrial develop- 
 ment of the factory system, there went a 
 "social" development, using the word in 
 its narrow meaning as referring to that body 
 of the elect which worships at the shrine 
 of fashion. Even to-day the stratification of 
 " Society " is one of the most interesting 
 phenomena to the student of social condi- 
 tions in a manufacturing community. The 
 factory system is indeed, as Arthur Shad- 
 well has said, " the history of workingmen 
 rising to be employers " ; and in the process, 
 by the acquisition of wealth and a degree of 
 leisure, there comes a change in the manner 
 of living. On the surface it is a small matter 
 the bean-supper becomes a dinner-party, 
 the public ball a dancing-party, and the 
 morning bath supersedes the Saturday night 
 tubbing ; but to the student of social con- 
 ditions all this has a real significance. 
 
 The machinist who founded the corpo- 
 ration, the development of which we have 
 just traced, lived simply, as did the men in
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 113 
 
 his employ ; his wife was cook, parlor-maid, 
 and seamstress, and it was owing to her fru- 
 gality more than to any other factor that he 
 was able to create an establishment which 
 to-day furnishes employment to several 
 hundred machinists, each living under so- 
 cial conditions similar to those he knew. 
 His son never wore overalls and jumper, 
 never worked at the bench and lathe, and 
 he was given an education which made his 
 father's associates shake their heads and 
 prophesy certain failure in life for the boy, 
 so great was their distrust of " book-learn- 
 ing." The grandson of the machinist went 
 to college, and his business failure was pre- 
 dicted. It would be difficult for one unfa- 
 miliar with the conditions to realize the 
 contempt with which an old-time machin- 
 ist, trained under the apprentice system, 
 looks upon a young man educated in a tech- 
 nical school, or how firm is his conviction 
 that a college-bred man must fail hopelessly 
 if he enters business. Machinists of this
 
 ii4 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 class may be found in any large shop ; they 
 are the survivors from an older day, before 
 imagination came to be the first essential of 
 commercial success, and form the human 
 links which unite the age of steam to the 
 days of the stage-coach. In their reminis- 
 cences we may trace with authority the 
 changes which have taken place in the 
 relation of employer and employee with 
 the growth of the factory system. 
 
 The social world in which the grandson 
 lived had, like the industrial conditions, 
 become complicated. If the machinist by 
 some unlucky chance put a steel knife to 
 his mouth, he might still be invited to the 
 next bean-supper ; but should the grandson 
 fail to call either in person or by pasteboard 
 on his hostess of two weeks before, his 
 name might be dropped from her list. This 
 social aspect had its influence in creating the 
 labor problem, for the personal touch be- 
 tween employer and employee necessarily 
 became weaker and weaker with the pro-
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 1 1 5 
 
 gress of social development. Moreover, an 
 aristocracy of wealth arose in which the 
 heartless condescension of an aristocracy of 
 blood was emphasized by a sort otreductio ad 
 absurdum. It is no less a sin to look down 
 upon a man because his grandfather did not 
 live on Beacon Hill than to despise him 
 because he earns his daily bread by the sweat 
 of his brow ; but the latter sin is the more 
 obvious. 
 
 I sometimes look out of my window 
 when the bell rings from the schoolhouse 
 across the street; the children who come 
 up the hill are ragged, some of them, while 
 some, who come from the opposite direc- 
 tion, are brought in fine carriages driven by 
 liveried coachmen. On the surface they 
 belong to different classes, yet their fathers 
 are engaged in the same business the 
 making of cotton cloth. It is true that their 
 fathers go in different social " sets," yet in 
 the mill the labor of each is essential to the 
 welfare of the industry. The children,
 
 n6 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 however, are of the same "set," and in the 
 democracy of the schoolyard mingle in 
 their play, for as yet they have not learned 
 the tremendous significance of clothes. The 
 father of one of the children, who came 
 to school in a motor-car, was offered a 
 position of trust in a factory, and his little 
 daughter, when she heard the news, cried, 
 fearing that she might be asked to carry 
 his dinner to him in a pail. When the 
 girl is grown to be a woman, she may laugh 
 at this incident, yet it is full of significance. 
 There are many families in every manu- 
 facturing town which conform to the 
 democracy of the schoolyard men and 
 women, who, in their attitude toward the 
 toilers, foretell that better understanding be- 
 tween the man who buys and the man who 
 sells labor, which is the solution of the pre- 
 sent problem ; because they have not worked 
 with their hands, they are better able to 
 view the complex life of the community 
 in true perspective ; but during the process
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 117 
 
 of rising from bench and lathe to leather- 
 bottomed chair and desk telephone, the 
 workingman is apt to view the problem 
 with distorted vision. 
 
 The history of the machine shops which 
 we have here briefly considered is the his- 
 tory, I believe, of nearly all similar manu- 
 facturing companies in the country, and 
 the facts in the development of the factory 
 system which we have observed in a par- 
 ticular case are applicable, also, to other 
 industries. 
 
 In the history of the factory system two 
 main factors appear which have a direct 
 bearing on our modern industrial unrest, 
 both tending to minimize the importance 
 of the individual worker and to create a 
 laboring and an employing class. Division 
 of labor is the first of these factors the 
 expression in the industrial world of that 
 specialization which in scholarship has 
 replaced the broader culture of our fathers 
 with the more precise learning of to-day,
 
 n8 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 and in the professions has given us doctors 
 of medicine whose knowledge of anatomy 
 is confined to a single organ, lawyers who 
 are unable to address a jury, and clergymen 
 who cannot preach sermons. I am not argu- 
 ing against this specialization, there is 
 much to be said to its advantage ; but it has 
 a tendency, in the professions, to a narrower 
 culture, and in the workshop, to the elim- 
 ination of the individuality of the worker. 
 Division of labor was made a necessity 
 by the discovery of the power of steam and 
 electricity, which united nation with na- 
 tion, thus creating a world-market. It was 
 the need for a larger production which 
 compelled the son of the machinist, quite 
 unconsciously, to adopt the new system; 
 and the moment he adopted it, the indi- 
 viduality of each worker in his employ 
 counted for less. The loss of the individu- 
 ality of the worker under the factory system 
 was, I believe, the direct cause of unionism. 
 The worker could no longer approach his
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 119 
 
 employer directly as man to man, and in 
 order to make himself of force he was com- 
 pelled to combine his efforts with the efforts 
 of others, and unionism was the result. 
 
 The value of trade-unions is a subject 
 too broad for our present discussion, but 
 that the movement is of value to the work- 
 ingman cannot be denied. That it may 
 serve the employer in his relation with the 
 employee, I believe, is likewise true. Grave 
 mistakes have been made by organized 
 labor, such as opposition to the introduc- 
 tion of improved machinery, the attempt 
 to limit the number of apprentices, and the 
 many abuses in vogue in union shops ; but 
 the movement is growing in strength, and, 
 as it grows, becomes more conservative. It 
 is hard to believe that less than a century 
 ago any combination of workingmen was 
 punishable under the common law by im- 
 prisonment, yet such is the fact. To-day 
 not only is the right of combination en- 
 couraged by law, but privileges are granted
 
 120 THE TIME-CLOCK 
 
 workingmen to further the principle of 
 collective bargaining a movement which 
 seeks to place the worker in the same re- 
 lation to his employer as that which ex- 
 isted between them in the beginning of the 
 factory system. 
 
 The labor problem in one aspect is how 
 justly to divide the profits of industry be- 
 tween the man who buys and the man who 
 sells labor. This division of profits must ac- 
 complish two things first, the employer 
 must receive a fair return on his invested 
 capital, and, second, the employee must 
 receive a living wage. This condition ob- 
 tained in the old days when master and man 
 worked side by side in the shop ; and it is 
 to-day the condition by which a more equi- 
 table industrial order may be established. 
 Professor Ryan has pointed out the possi- 
 bility of a distribution of profits under 
 which every capable worker may receive 
 a living wage; the method by which he 
 would accomplish this result by act of
 
 THE TIME-CLOCK 121 
 
 legislature we need not here consider; 
 but granting the possibility of a living wage, 
 one way to establish it is by collective bar- 
 gaining, based on the fact that no trade 
 is a good one, nor in the long run profit- 
 able, unless both parties to it are satisfied. 
 No combination of employers can long 
 conduct an industry in which the workers 
 are with reason discontented, and no com- 
 bination of workers can continue to de- 
 mand and obtain an undeserved share of the 
 profits. The problem involved in collective 
 bargaining is the same problem which 
 master and man faced when they quarreled 
 out their differences as they worked side 
 by side in the shop, only multiplied many 
 times ; and its solution lies in the same fair- 
 ness and mutual respect which, in an earlier 
 day, restored harmony between two antag- 
 onistic shopmates the parties to an indi- 
 vidual bargain.
 
 V 
 
 TRADE-UNIONISM AND THE 
 INDIVIDUAL WORKER
 
 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 WORKER 
 
 AS we walk the streets of the City of 
 the Dinner-Pail, enter its factories, 
 and visit the homes of its people, the 
 homes alike of those who buy and those 
 who sell labor, we may observe in the 
 varied life about us every phase of the 
 labor problem, which, when viewed in the 
 larger field of the nation, appears so com- 
 plicated to the average citizen that he de- 
 spairs of understanding it. If we were to 
 study ever so casually the history of the 
 great industry which gives the city its dis- 
 tinction, we should discover the source of 
 many perplexing social questions which in 
 America tend to separate class from class
 
 126 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 in a manner singularly at variance with 
 the ideals of the Republic. 
 
 In the early days of the last century, 
 the wives of farmers who tilled the fields 
 now traversed by the city streets, sat be- 
 fore the spinning-wheel and hand-loom 
 after the work upon the farm was done, and 
 wove the cloth from which their gowns 
 were made ; they wove linen, too, from 
 flax grown upon their own land, and even 
 the woolen clothes the farmer wore were 
 the product of household industry. It is not 
 difficult to imagine the interest of these 
 farmer-folk in the first factory which was 
 built upon the stream ; their refusal to be- 
 lieve that a water-wheel might be made of 
 sufficient power to operate so great a plant 
 as that first factory, which in size would 
 not serve as an engine-room for a mod- 
 ern spinning-mill; their wonder as they 
 watched the imported machinery, pro- 
 ducing more yarn in a day than a thou- 
 sand hands might make on spinning-wheels
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 127 
 
 during a long winter. We can imagine, 
 too, how eagerly the sons and daughters 
 of the farmers sought work in the new 
 factory, and the pride they took in receiv- 
 ing their wages, paid in money and ex- 
 changeable at the village store for stylish 
 foreign fabrics such as no farmer's wife 
 could ever weave. 
 
 That successful first mill was followed 
 by another and another, each indeed small, 
 but each somewhat larger and better 
 equipped than those that went before, and 
 all operated by native help, with now and 
 then a foreign worker of Irish or English 
 birth. More factories were built, and for- 
 eigners came in great numbers to operate 
 the machinery; but the transition from 
 native help was so gradual that the citi- 
 zens did not realize how social classes 
 were forming in this democratic com- 
 munity. The newly built Roman Catho- 
 lic church gave the Protestants something 
 of a shudder, especially when its commu-
 
 128 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 nicants celebrated Christinas; and the puri- 
 tanical proprietors, who had not learned to 
 exchange gifts in memory of our Saviour's 
 birth, complained because the Irish refused 
 to work on the twenty-fifth of December. 
 Here was the first suggestion of conflicting 
 social ideals. 
 
 The immigrants, however, had no part 
 in the event which made evident the 
 growth of class consciousness in the City 
 of the Dinner-Pail ; that occurred in a 
 Baptist meeting-house and among Chris- 
 tian folk of the same denomination. A 
 bill had been introduced in the state legis- 
 lature limiting the hours of factory labor 
 to ten a day, and agitation in favor of its 
 adoption ran high. On the farm the day 
 began at no particular hour, nor was there 
 any stated time when work was ended, 
 and a man was paid for a day's labor with- 
 out regard to the length of it. Some, how- 
 ever, saw a distinction between farm and 
 factory labor, and among these was the
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 129 
 
 minister of the Baptist church. One Sun- 
 day at the hour of service, the congrega- 
 tion, in which mill-owners and operatives 
 sat side by side, was thrown into great 
 excitement by the pastor, who preached a 
 sermon advocating the ten-hour bill; and 
 when his hearers filed out of the meeting- 
 house that morning, they were no longer 
 a united body. The man who sold labor 
 continued to listen to the preaching of 
 the ten-hour parson; but the man who 
 bought labor built for himself another 
 meeting-house; and soon afterwards the 
 first labor union was formed. The same 
 causes which for years had been at work 
 silently to create discord in the Baptist 
 flock had at the same time been in opera- 
 tion in the factory, gradually separating 
 the employer and employee in their per- 
 sonal relations, until at last it seemed that 
 their interests were no longer common, and 
 that the future success of each must be to 
 the disadvantage of the other. So indus-
 
 1 3 o TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 trial warfare took the place of mutual 
 good-will, and more than half a century 
 passed before the contending factions be- 
 gan to see the folly of their antagonism. 
 
 The development of unionism was as 
 natural as the development of the factory 
 system, which made the association of 
 workers necessary. So long as factory- 
 owners and factory operatives worked side 
 by side in the shop, so long as the man 
 who bought and the man who sold labor 
 belonged to the same social class, so long 
 as a close personal relation existed between 
 master and man, there was no need for 
 organized labor; but when, in the compli- 
 cated development of the factory system, 
 the employer, once associated in business 
 with the employee, found in the manage- 
 ment of the concern his sole occupation, 
 and became separated from the workman 
 by a hierarchy of foremen and overseers, 
 the personal relation between the buyer 
 and the seller of labor being lost, it
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 131 
 
 came about quite naturally that the work- 
 man combined his efforts with the efforts 
 of others of his class in order to command 
 collectively that consideration from the 
 employer which each employee had re- 
 ceived individually in the earlier stages of 
 the factory system. First, the men in sep- 
 arate shops talked over their common in- 
 terests in friendly discussions while at their 
 work ; later they continued these discus- 
 sions in the evening at some appointed 
 meeting-place and the local trade-union 
 was born. With the growth of class con- 
 sciousness, local federations of labor fol- 
 lowed, recognizing the common interests 
 of all hand-workers in the community; 
 and these federations in turn became united 
 in a national labor movement, in which 
 the welfare of the individual became sub- 
 ordinated to the welfare of the toilers as 
 a class. 
 
 In administrative principles the national 
 labor movement has shown two divergent
 
 132 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 tendencies : the Knights of Labor sought 
 to establish a strong central body, the ob- 
 ject being to unite in a single organization 
 all the workingmen of the nation, while 
 the American Federation of Labor, subse- 
 quently organized, has endeavored to keep 
 all legislative power in the hands of the 
 several crafts the Federation being little 
 more than an advisory centre. This plan, 
 recognizing in a larger measure the value 
 of the individual, has been the more suc- 
 cessful, for since the year 1886, when the 
 Knights of Labor numbered over seven 
 hundred thousand members, that body has 
 rapidly declined in numbers and power, 
 while the American Federation has stead- 
 ily increased in influence, and to-day pos- 
 sesses all the machinery necessary to 
 achieve the end for which it was created ; 
 namely, to emphasize the human element 
 which is attached to labor as a commodity. 
 How well adapted to its purpose this 
 machinery is, those who follow the events
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 133 
 
 in the labor-world are well aware. We 
 see how the demands for higher wages, 
 for shorter hours, for more favorable fac- 
 tory conditions, have been enforced ; some- 
 times by actual strike, more often by the 
 mere threat on the part of the unions to 
 call out their members. When we come 
 to study the history of labor unions, we 
 find that the part which the movement 
 has played in the social progress of the 
 toiler is greater than at first appears. The 
 reform laws passed by the British Parlia- 
 ment in the last century had their begin- 
 ning in the class-consciousness which arose 
 in the manufacturing cities, following the 
 establishment of the factory system. The 
 first of these acts legalized combinations 
 of workingmen, and thus liberated a force 
 which was felt in later legislation, having 
 for its object the amelioration of the social 
 condition of the toilers. " Mercy by Stat- 
 ute" Lord Ashley's phrase to describe 
 the British Factory Acts, made law through
 
 1 34 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 his devoted struggle for the cause of labor 
 was due in no small measure to the 
 rise of trade-unionism. As early as 1833 
 laws were passed to regulate the labor of 
 children and young persons in the textile 
 factories of the United Kingdom; but it 
 was nearly ten years later before public 
 attention was called to the pitiable condi- 
 tion of a class of juvenile workers which 
 exceeded tenfold in number those engaged 
 in the textile industries; and the reason 
 for this delay is to be found in the fact 
 that bleacheries and print-works, paper- 
 mills, establishments for the manufacture 
 of glass and earthenware, pins and needles, 
 buttons, and a hundred like commodities, 
 were not conducted on the great scale of 
 the textile plants, nor were these industries 
 confined to manufacturing cities, popu- 
 lated by men and women with common 
 industrial and social interests. The chil- 
 dren thus employed were neglected longer 
 than the others, because there were no agi-
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 135 
 
 tators to plead their cause, and no vast body 
 of discontented workers clamoring for the 
 amelioration of their social condition. 
 
 From the year 1824, when Parlia- 
 ment repealed the Combination Laws, to 
 the Trade Disputes Act in 1906, the 
 weapon of the British workingman in ob- 
 taining legislative benefits has been agita- 
 tion through unionism. The first labor 
 agitators in the City of the Dinner-Pail 
 were English operatives of the same stock 
 as the men who, a generation before, 
 lighted the torch of individual freedom 
 in Lancashire, and, despised by the gov- 
 erning classes, meeting secretly as outlaws, 
 compelled a reluctant parliament to give 
 heed to the rights of labor, and in the end 
 to grant schools and the franchise to the 
 children of toil. While in America trade- 
 unionism had no such mighty task to ac- 
 complish, political equality being already 
 established, the conditions of the factory 
 system made the movement a necessary
 
 136 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 one, and it would be idle to deny the in- 
 fluence of organized labor in shaping the 
 course of legislative enactment. 
 
 Granting, then, that organized labor is 
 possessed of the machinery necessary to ob- 
 tain its object, and that this object is alto- 
 gether admirable, being nothing less than 
 winning from the industrial regime a recog- 
 nition of the dignity of the laborer as a 
 man, unionism should merit the unfalter- 
 ing loyalty of every toiler. Many working- 
 men, however, and among them some of 
 the most intelligent, are opposed to organ- 
 ized labor, and on the very ground that it 
 detracts something from the dignity of the 
 individual. There is evidently some phase of 
 the movement which we have overlooked. 
 
 So far as organized labor has been suc- 
 cessful in emphasizing the distinction be- 
 tween labor and the laborer, the commodity 
 and the man who sells the commodity, and 
 has replaced the personal relation which 
 once existed between the employer and the
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 137 
 
 employee with an equitable regime of col- 
 lective bargaining, unionism has been an 
 untold blessing to the toiling millions a 
 blessing alike to skilled and unskilled labor. 
 There is, however, another side to the shield. 
 Unionism came into being to emphasize the 
 dignity of the laborer as a man it resulted 
 from a highly organized industrial system, 
 in which the individual played an insigni- 
 ficant part. Then unionism, in turn, became 
 highly organized, so that to-day its chief 
 danger is not to the employer, but to the 
 employee, and lies in the direction of the 
 evil which it was established to overcome. 
 The object of unionism is to assert the dig- 
 nity of the individual worker as a man; and 
 while, by the very act of combination, the 
 laborer surrenders his will to that of the ma- 
 jority, he does it for the sake of demanding 
 from the factory system a recognition of his 
 personality; that besides being one little 
 wheel in the vast industrial machine, he may 
 be a man as well.
 
 138 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 Important as the benefits of unionism 
 have been, we are, nevertheless, apt to over- 
 emphasize them and to forget that the 
 movement is but one phase of the progress 
 which the mass of mankind is still making 
 towards the full consciousness of freedom. 
 The value of unionism is in the loyalty 
 of its members, not to an organization 
 merely, but to the inclusive cause of labor. 
 "Loyalty," says JosiahRoyce, " is the Will 
 to Believe in something eternal, and to 
 express that belief in the practical life of a 
 human being." Now, the cause of labor, 
 uniting in itself the lives of all the workers, 
 is an eternal cause ; its object is to advance 
 the consciousness of human freedom among 
 the masses; and unionism is but one means 
 by which loyalty to this cause may be 
 expressed. The moment, therefore, that 
 unionism demands of its members a special 
 loyalty to an organization which exists 
 only as a means of furthering an eternal 
 cause, this narrow loyalty becomes a menace
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 139 
 
 to every worker whose name is not enrolled 
 upon the union lists ; when it entails a dis- 
 regard for duties which each man owes to 
 every other fellow man, unionism ceases to 
 advance the cause of labor, and becomes 
 instead a hindrance. 
 
 That unionism is often unmindful of the 
 inclusive cause of labor is illustrated by the 
 policy of a minimum wage. The intent of 
 this policy is, of course, favorable to the 
 cause of labor, in that it aims to raise the 
 standard of wages ; but in the present stage of 
 our industrial development the policy fails 
 to accomplish this result ; for a minimum 
 wage is usually determined by the average 
 ability of all the workers in any shop adopt- 
 ing the plan, and the employer, forced to 
 pay the uniform rate to workers incapable 
 of earning it, finds it necessary, in order that 
 his cost of production shall not exceed that 
 of his competitors, to withhold from many 
 superior workmen a rate of wages higher 
 than the minimum, which otherwise they
 
 140 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 might receive. Thus the minimum wage 
 tends to become a common wage, the un- 
 earned increase granted the incapable work- 
 ers being paid from the earnings of their 
 more efficient shopmates. The policy, there- 
 fore, is sharply antagonistic to the develop- 
 ment of efficiency in the individual worker ; 
 it stunts his growth as a man by setting a 
 limit to his ambition ; it assumes equal effi- 
 ciency among all the members of any craft, 
 and by- placing equal value upon an hour's 
 labor without regard to the quality of it, 
 destroys the reward of ambition. 
 
 A fact too frequently neglected in con- 
 sidering the relation of trade-unionism to 
 the individual worker is that there are dis- 
 tinct classes even among wage-workers. 
 First, we have the vast army of unskilled 
 labor, constantly recruited from the swarm 
 of immigrants who daily pass the inspectors 
 at Ellis Island: wanderers from the old 
 world who have never learned a trade come 
 to take their places in our industrial order
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 141 
 
 as common laborers. As we review the 
 army, our first thought is one of fear for the 
 permanence of a state which so freely har- 
 bors this uncouth and unschooled throng, 
 and we sympathize for the moment with 
 those labor leaders who look askance at the 
 newcomers, seeing in their presence here 
 a degrading influence upon American labor. 
 But if we look more searchingly into the 
 faces of this eager throng passing with high 
 hopes through the gateway of the new 
 world, our fears will be dispelled, for im- 
 migration calls for courage and every other 
 personal quality which makes for social 
 progress ; they have left their old homes 
 in quest of a more favorable environment 
 for individual growth ; in America they find 
 that environment, and thousands of them 
 make the most of it. 
 
 The immigrant, on his arrival in America 
 without a trade, in most cases without a 
 knowledge of the language even, frequently 
 the victim of unscrupulous men who seek
 
 142 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 to exploit his labor, begins work at a dis- 
 advantage and at a wage approximating the 
 meagre income to which he was accus- 
 tomed in the old world. Many employers 
 will say that to pay him higher wages is to 
 make him indolent, and there is a foundation 
 for the statement. At home his wh ole life has 
 been a battle for mere existence, there was 
 no margin of wages to be saved, and quite 
 naturally, when in the new world he earns 
 a wage sufficient to provide food, clothes, 
 and shelter, and have a penny beside, he 
 does not save this penny but spends it to buy 
 immunity from toil. After a time, how- 
 ever, he becomes acquainted with men and 
 women of his own race who are no longer 
 strangers in the new world ; he visits them 
 in their homes, and finds that the floors 
 are carpeted, that the children go to school 
 and wear clean frocks, that the table is served 
 with meat and fresh vegetables ; then he 
 begins to note a difference between life in 
 the old world and the new, and he desires
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 143 
 
 the luxuries his friends enjoy. He begins to 
 look beyond to-day, and becomes ambitious 
 for the future. Soon his children go well 
 dressed to school and return to a well-kept 
 home ; the immigrant has entered the 
 second class of labor, the characteristic of 
 which is thrift. 
 
 There is a higher class of labor, and one 
 of vast importance in the evolution by 
 which the worker of to-day becomes the 
 employer of to-morrow : it consists of those 
 who are not only ambitious for their own 
 success and the success of their children, 
 but who look beyond the pay-envelope even, 
 and find happiness in work well done. A 
 machinist recently died in the City of the 
 Dinner-Pail who for nearly half a century 
 had been in the employ of one corporation; 
 year after year he worked at the same lathe 
 until its very ways of hardened steel were 
 worn beyond further service, and in all that 
 time his interest in the affairs of the shop 
 could have been no greater had he, him-
 
 i 4 4 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 self, been sole proprietor. Sometimes he 
 bought tools with his own money to facili- 
 tate his work, and he refused to charge 
 many an hour of overtime because the labor 
 had not been exacted of him ; he looked 
 upon his trade as a fine art and took the 
 same joy in a perfected mechanism that the 
 painter takes in his finished picture. While 
 this machinist was, no doubt, an exception, 
 there are many who work with the same 
 joy of service ; and when, in addition to 
 their love of labor and knowledge of their 
 trade, they have executive ability as well, 
 these men leave behind them the bench 
 and lathe and become themselves employers 
 of labor. 
 
 Because the workers are divided into 
 these and many more classes, the task at- 
 tempted by unionism to create an average 
 craftsman and then set its machinery at 
 work in his interest is not only a difficult 
 matter to accomplish, but is in result hos- 
 tile to the development of the individual.
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 145 
 
 It may be quite true, as the Socialist con- 
 tends, that we should take even greater 
 care to improve the social organism, of 
 which we are a part, than to perfect our 
 own individual growth ; and that the per- 
 fect development of each individual is not 
 the highest development of his own per- 
 sonality, but learning to fill, in the best 
 possible way, his own little place in the 
 social world. This is the old question of 
 the one and the many which has given 
 philosophers in every field of thought no 
 end of trouble, for the reason that neither 
 ideal is alone sufficient. Like the citizens 
 of a state, the union workers are united by 
 a common interest into an organized com- 
 munity ; but just as, in the state, each in- 
 dividual relinquishes only the right to do 
 those things which hamper his own phys- 
 ical and moral growth, and thus the 
 physical and moral growth of the com- 
 munity, and relinquishes nothing which 
 makes for a higher individual and conse-
 
 146 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 quently a higher social attainment, so the 
 worker, by his act of association with his 
 fellows, does not sacrifice his right to a 
 well-rounded individual development. 
 
 Not long ago the King of England 
 touched with his sword the shoulder of a 
 working mason, who knelt before him, 
 and said, "Arise, Sir William Grossman." 
 A man was raised to the honor of knight- 
 hood in a country where little more than 
 a generation ago his espousal of the labor 
 cause would have brought him before the 
 law courts on the charge of conspiracy. 
 Surely unionism has served with power 
 the progress of human freedom. It is pos- 
 sible that the movement may still serve, 
 and with increasing power, the progress 
 of mankind, but to-day there may be ob- 
 served elements of danger to this free serv- 
 ice. The average citizen has an interest 
 in this matter, and should study the facts 
 with care. The value of unionism has 
 ever consisted in the emphasis it has placed
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 147 
 
 on the dignity of the individual ; to pre- 
 serve its usefulness in advancing the wel- 
 fare of the workman, unionism must hold 
 fast to this purpose. 
 
 There was once a time when the glory 
 of a state was told in the chronicles of its 
 wars; the soldier was then the hero and 
 physical prowess the measure of his great- 
 ness; the soldier indeed was king and the 
 king the state. True, there were crafts- 
 men in those days, but few in number 
 compared with the soldiers; and there 
 were husbandmen, who tilled the soil that 
 the women and priests might not starve, 
 and that a great feast should be spread 
 when the lord of the castle rode back vic- 
 torious from the wars. But with the rise 
 of democracy the position of the crafts- 
 man and the husbandman, the workers of 
 the world, was vastly changed; the worker 
 became the important person, while the 
 soldier was tolerated only to protect him 
 in his industry. And the history of the
 
 148 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 state since the dawn of the new doctrine 
 has been dominated by the progress of the 
 workingman. 
 
 Slowly throughout the centuries the 
 consciousness of freedom had been devel- 
 oping in the minds of men. Magna Charta, 
 while containing many benefits for the 
 people, was in no sense a declaration of 
 freedom; the Barons planted the seed 
 merely, seed which for five hundred years 
 slowly matured, until the industrial revo- 
 lution, which occurred but a century ago, 
 made possible the ripening of the fruit in 
 our own generation. With the industrial 
 revolution came the factory, and about 
 the factory the city sprang up, populated 
 by a people whose interests were identical. 
 Great cities already existed, but they were 
 peopled by men and women occupied 
 with divers activities ; in the factory towns 
 a single occupation gave a livelihood to 
 thousands, leading these thousands to unite 
 their efforts for the advancement of their
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 149 
 
 condition, which in the end made for the 
 progress of human freedom throughout 
 the world. 
 
 The advent of the factory in England, 
 however, created, at first, a reign of great 
 misery among the workers. Not even the 
 galley slaves in the ancient world suffered 
 in mind and body the tortures which 
 were the daily life of the early factory 
 operatives. In Manchester, when the ten- 
 hour law was first agitated, one half the 
 population sought public charity in bring- 
 ing their children into the world, and of 
 these children less than one half lived 
 until their fifth year. The survivors at the 
 age of seven began to work in the facto- 
 ries, thousands of them slaving under cruel 
 taskmasters who used the lash without 
 mercy throughout the fourteen hours of 
 daily toil ; the factory became the plague- 
 spot of immorality, concerning which we 
 have many a painful contemporary record : 
 "Fathers have sworn to it," says The
 
 150 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 Chronicle, "and wished they had been 
 childless." As we walk the streets of the 
 City of the Dinner-Pail and mingle with 
 the self-respecting throng of quiet-man- 
 nered, neatly dressed mill-girls, or enter 
 its factories where no child under fourteen 
 years of age may be allowed to work ; as 
 we visit the homes of the operatives and 
 note in how great a measure happiness or 
 misery depends upon individual thrift, we 
 marvel at the progress wrought by the 
 last century in the social condition of the 
 workingmen. 
 
 Just as the women spun cotton, wool, 
 and flax, upon the farms where now stand 
 the great factories of the City of the Din- 
 ner-Pail, so for centuries before the inven- 
 tions of Arkwright, the British craftsmen 
 made the textile fabrics of a nation upon 
 spinning-wheels and hand-looms in their 
 own homes. When the factories were 
 built, this vast company of workers was 
 thrown upon the world without gainful
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 151 
 
 employment. Some were taught to oper- 
 ate the machinery within the factory 
 walls, but thousands were unable to learn 
 a new trade, and the condition of these 
 was so deplorable that years afterward, 
 when the conscience of the nation would 
 no longer permit half-naked women and 
 children to do the work of beasts of bur- 
 den in the dark caverns of the coal-mines, 
 these hand-loom weavers hailed the event 
 with joy and gladly offered themselves for 
 this brutalizing employment. It is small 
 wonder, then, that the labor movement 
 began with violence, and that the crafts- 
 men, dispossessed of their means of liveli- 
 hood, avenged themselves by breaking 
 machinery and burning factories. 
 
 The factory hand produced a hundred- 
 fold more yarn and cloth than the crafts- 
 man, and the cry of over-production 
 was heard throughout the manufacturing 
 world; wages fell until a day of toil 
 bought but another day of greater misery,
 
 152 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 and starvation seemed to be the gift which 
 machinery had brought to the worker. 
 Thus the cause of the dispossessed crafts- 
 men and that of the operatives who took 
 their places became one the cause of 
 labor, the right of men by virtue of their 
 human birth to something higher than 
 the lives of beasts, to the creation of a 
 social environment, by legislation if need 
 be, in which the individual might develop 
 his own personality. Then, because it was 
 a crime for workingmen to meet and dis- 
 cuss the evils they endured, unionism was 
 born in secret chambers, from which 
 went forth the agitators who became the 
 pioneers of industrial freedom. What these 
 men accomplished for human progress is 
 recorded in the history of the reform par- 
 liaments of the last century; it is recorded, 
 too, in the political history of every civil- 
 ized nation. In the great movement for 
 the political enfranchisement of the masses, 
 which was the most conspicuous social
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 153 
 
 phenomenon of the last century, organ- 
 ized labor played no insignificant part; 
 and the fundamental ideal which ani- 
 mated this movement was the dignity of 
 the individual and the right of every man 
 to the fullest possible scope for the devel- 
 opment of his own personality. 
 
 Those who mark the evolution under- 
 lying our present civilization are coming 
 to believe with Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who 
 long ago advanced the theory, that the 
 people, having been admitted to equal 
 political rights, are next to be admitted 
 to equal social opportunity. It may be 
 that in this next and greater stage of the 
 progress of the masses, trade-unionism is 
 to play no part; that the narrowness of 
 its organization, working in the interest 
 of a select class of workers, may prevent 
 the movement from further advancing the 
 cause of labor. There is much in the pre- 
 sent attitude of the organization to give 
 ground for this belief, but those who
 
 154 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 
 
 appreciate the service of unionism in the 
 past still hope that its usefulness is not 
 outworn. The function of unionism has 
 ever been to emphasize the human ele- 
 ment which is attached to labor as a com- 
 modity, to assist in creating an environ- 
 ment in which the individual toiler may 
 have free scope for the development of 
 his own personality. In the coming social 
 evolution some factor must contribute this 
 function; shall that factor be organized 
 labor ? If the cause of unionism is made 
 identical with the cause of labor, and thus 
 ministers to the social progress of every 
 workingman, we may believe that trade- 
 unionism still has a work to accomplish; 
 but if the movement is to minister to a 
 class of workingmen only, its usefulness is 
 already at an end. For the cause of labor 
 is an eternal cause, in which the lives of 
 all the wage-workers are united; and its 
 object is to advance the consciousness of 
 human freedom throughout the world.
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 155 
 
 Such a cause, from its very nature, must 
 guarantee to every workingman that full 
 measure of individual growth which is 
 the priceless gift of freedom. And this 
 right to a well-rounded personal develop- 
 ment is no part of a narrow individual- 
 ism; it does not mean that the individual 
 shall cease to make sacrifices for the wel- 
 fare of his fellow men, but, rather, that 
 the worker, advancing to a richer personal 
 life, shall come to the knowledge that 
 man as man is free, and to a full conscious- 
 ness of that freedom which is perfect 
 service.
 
 VI 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 AFTER a winter spent in the City of 
 the Dinner-Pail, in the midst of its 
 busy life and in touch with that vast army 
 of toilers which daily marches to the sound 
 of the factory bells, I found myself, when 
 summer came, comfortably settled on a sea- 
 girt farm near Newport. At first it was 
 difficult to realize that the scenes about me 
 and the scenes in the life of the toiler, to 
 which I was so accustomed, were parts of 
 the same drama. Yet the scenes so differ- 
 ent are intimately connected, and there is 
 more than passing significance in the fact 
 that Fall River and Newport are separated 
 by only twenty miles of railway track. 
 
 At Newport no factory bell awakes the 
 sleeper in the early morning hours ; the hum 
 of industry does not reach the ear at noon-
 
 160 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 day here is no camping ground for the 
 Army of the Dinner-Pail. No, this quaint 
 old city by the sea has nothing to suggest 
 of wealth in the making it speaks rather 
 of wealth accumulated, and by its splendid 
 pageantry dazzles the imagination with vis- 
 ions of America's material prosperity. Here 
 is more magnificence than you may find in 
 the courts of kings the lavish display of 
 princes in a democracy where all men are 
 created equal. 
 
 My first impression of Newport, how- 
 ever, had nothing to do with its lavish 
 pageantry it related rather to the toil of 
 fisher-folk and farm-hands, and thus in the 
 end became the means of unifying in my 
 mind the problems suggested by the two 
 cities. The farm was situated on the point 
 which reaches out toward Brenton's Reef, 
 on which, some weeks before, a fishing 
 steamer had been wrecked. For several 
 days I studied the stranded vessel, wonder- 
 ing how long it might be before the sea
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 161 
 
 would break it up, and if the ship were 
 copper-fastened, and if so, how many 
 barrels of driftwood I might find along 
 the beach to burn in my study fire when 
 the winter evenings came. But others had 
 looked upon the wreck who had no thought 
 of driftwood fires and colored flames, but 
 who saw anchored there upon the rocks 
 a whole season's fuel for their homes ; and 
 these men set about to do themselves what I 
 had hoped the wind and waves might do for 
 me. There on the reef lay the wrecked 
 vessel, to me a picturesque sight, suggesting 
 wind and weather and the perils of the sea ; 
 but to the farmers and the fisher-folk it 
 suggested cords of firewood and a winter 
 day's necessity. 
 
 Three companies engaged in reclaiming 
 the wreck : one of Greek fishermen, whose 
 huts stand on the beach near by, one of 
 Portuguese farmers, whose scant acres lie 
 some miles to the north, the other of farm- 
 hands employed on one of the nearby
 
 1 62 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 estates. The work, begun in the afternoon 
 when the tide was rising, was carried on 
 until midnight. Men with ropes about 
 their bodies swam to the wreck, and reach- 
 ing it, hauled great hawsers from the shore ; 
 these they made fast forward, aft, and 
 amidships. On shore yokes of oxen and 
 teams of horses strained and tugged at the 
 hawsers, wresting from the sea its lawful 
 booty, and at last hauling the huge disman- 
 tled craft upon the nearer rocks. 
 
 The ship, being derelict, was anybody's 
 property, so the work was carried on by 
 moonlight, lest others who had not borne 
 the heat and burden of the day should come 
 by night and carry away the prize. The 
 Greeks were more fortunate than the rest, 
 for their part of the wreck included the 
 pilot-house. This they, wading and swim- 
 ming beyond the surf or tugging from the 
 shore, towed into a little cove between two 
 points of weather-beaten cliffs and landed 
 it upon the beach. In the pilot-house they
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 163 
 
 camped for the night ; but for the others, 
 they must work while the moonlight lasted 
 and afterwards keep vigil until sunrise. A 
 deal of labor this for a pile of firewood ; 
 hard labor indeed for the simplest necessity 
 of life. 
 
 Later in the season, within half a mile 
 of the place where the wreck was brought 
 to the shore, I witnessed another scene 
 a scene of action quite as strenuous but to 
 a different purpose. The polo grounds are 
 situated on the same point where the ves- 
 sel went ashore. The green field lay bright 
 in the sunshine, while beyond rolled the 
 ocean, blue as the sky above it. About the 
 side-lines great ladies and gentlemen of 
 fashion were gathered to enjoy the game. 
 Some sat in finely upholstered carriages, 
 drawn by magnificent horses, whose golden 
 harness-trappings glittered in the sunshine ; 
 others sat in automobiles; while others, 
 clinging to the tradition of an earlier day, 
 were there on horseback. On the piazza
 
 1 64 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 of the clubhouse finely gowned women 
 and well-groomed men drank tea while 
 they watched swift-footed ponies, bearing 
 their crimson and yellow-clad riders, hel- 
 ter-skelter over the field. As for the game, 
 it was a splendid show ; they played well, 
 those husky young fellows, with a skill and 
 courage altogether admirable, giving the 
 lie to the notion that wealth and dissipation 
 necessarily go hand-in-hand. 
 
 As I watched the game, admiring the 
 skill of the players and realizing the mag- 
 nificent surroundings in which they spend 
 their lives, surroundings permitting in- 
 finite leisure for the cultivation of body and 
 mind, the words quoted by Matthew 
 Arnold, in his beautiful apostrophe to Ox- 
 ford, came to my mind. "There are our 
 young Barbarians all at play." Arnold, it 
 will be remembered, referred to the upper, 
 middle, and lower classes of society as Bar- 
 barians, Philistines, and Populace. The 
 aristocrats, he said, inherited from the
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 165 
 
 Barbarian nobles, their early ancestors, that 
 individualism, that passion for doing as one 
 likes, which was so marked a characteris- 
 tic. From the Barbarians, moreover, came 
 their love of field sports, the care of the 
 body, manly vigor, good looks, and fine 
 complexions. "The chivalry of the Bar- 
 barians, with its characteristics of high 
 spirit, choice manners, and distinguished 
 bearing, what is this," he asks, "but the 
 commencement of the politeness of our 
 aristocratic class ? " " There are our young 
 Barbarians all at play." That line of Ar- 
 nold's coming to my mind, which at the 
 moment was contrasting the scenes I have 
 described, suggested the thought that, de- 
 spite the familiar words in the Declaration 
 of Independence, and our inherited repug- 
 nance to the idea, we have an upper, mid- 
 dle, and lower class in America. 
 
 We cannot refer to our aristocracy by 
 the term Barbarians, for its members are 
 not descended from "some victor in a
 
 1 66 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 Border brawl," their ancestors being of the 
 old-world populace. Yet by whatever name 
 it may be called, our aristocracy of wealth 
 possesses characteristics curiously akin to 
 the descendants of the Goths and Huns. 
 
 America has been a surprisingly short 
 time in creating this aristocracy in all its 
 refinement. We need not now be ashamed 
 to entertain the most beribboned prince in 
 our summer palaces at Newport ; and yet, 
 but little over fifty years ago, the author 
 of "Lotus-Eating" complained mightily 
 of the lack of refinement in the " Society" 
 of that famous watering-place. "A very 
 little time will reveal its characteristic to 
 be exaggeration. The intensity which is 
 the natural attribute of a new race, and 
 which finds in active business its due direc- 
 tion and achieves there its truest present 
 success, becomes ludicrous in the social 
 sphere, because it has no taste and no sense 
 of propriety." He complained that the 
 aristocracy, being most successful in the
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 167 
 
 acquisition of wealth, knew but poorly 
 how to spend it ; that Croesus, having made 
 his money, was bent on throwing it away, 
 so he built his house just like his neigh- 
 bors' only a little bigger and furnished 
 it with Louis Quinze or Louis Quatorze 
 deformities, just like his neighbors, and 
 bought carriages and gave dinners and wore 
 splendid clothes, but owned few books or 
 pictures; he was mastered by his means, 
 and any other man with a large rent-roll 
 was always respectable and awful to him. 
 " What is high society," asks the Lotus- 
 Eater, "but the genial intercourse of the 
 highest intelligence with which we con- 
 verse? It is the festival of Wit and Beauty 
 and Wisdom. ... Its hall of reunion, 
 whether Holland House, or Charles Lamb's 
 parlor, or Schiller's garret, or the Tuileries, 
 is a palace of pleasure. Wine and flowers and 
 all successes of Art, delicate dresses stud- 
 ded with gems, the graceful motion to pas- 
 sionate and festal music, are its ornaments
 
 1 68 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 and Arabesque outlines. It is a tournament 
 wherein the force of the hero is refined 
 into the grace of the gentleman a masque, 
 in which womanly sentiment blends with 
 manly thought. This is the noble idea of 
 society, a harmonious play of the purest 
 powers." And in Newport he finds but the 
 form of it the promise that the ideal 
 may some day be realized ; but for the time 
 we must be content with the exaggeration, 
 for " Fine Society is a fruit that ripens 
 slowly." 
 
 A generation only has passed since the 
 Lotus-Eater wrote his charming book, and 
 making allowances for an exaggeration of 
 style quite in keeping with the exaggera- 
 tion of the fashionable folk about whom 
 he wrote, we may say that his dream of 
 what American society should be is, in a 
 measure, a reality. Here in Newport is 
 seen not only the form of a " Fine Society," 
 but something of the substance. To be sure, 
 much of exaggeration remains, but it is
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 169 
 
 hardly fair to call it characteristic ; it re- 
 mains in the excesses of the ultra-fashion- 
 able set the very new aristocracy; but 
 back of this excess, the description of which 
 furnishes many fair readers with so much 
 enjoyment in the Sunday papers, there is a 
 solid foundation of good manners, bred of 
 culture, in which we may find that " har- 
 monious play of the purest powers " the 
 Lotus-Eater longed to see. 
 
 This aristocracy, founded on money 
 though it be, early learned that money is 
 but a means, that culture is the end, and 
 it soon came about that a man must be a 
 pretty insignificant sort of a millionaire, 
 who by his benefactions was unable to 
 found a university, or at least have a profes- 
 sorship named for him, even if he himself 
 were unable to write English grammatically 
 and the children of these millionaires 
 benefited by their father's aspirations. We 
 may not say by what marvelous means the 
 transformation was effected, but certain it
 
 170 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 is, the Newport of to-day is very different 
 from the Newport of a generation ago. 
 Croesus does not build his house just like 
 his neighbors', only a little bigger, but com- 
 mands the services of the ablest architects, 
 who have transformed Newport from a city 
 of commonplace cottages to one of rare 
 architectural distinction. If Croesus lacks 
 the taste to furnish his house becomingly, 
 he has the sense to hire a decorator to do 
 it for him although in a larger measure 
 than we realize, this is unnecessary ; for 
 Croesus has, in these later days, abandoned 
 fast horses and flashy waistcoats, and has 
 learned to buy pictures and books for him- 
 self and he enjoys them, too, which is 
 even a greater matter. He does not always 
 spend his money wisely that were ask- 
 ing too much in a single generation; he 
 still makes too great a show of his money, 
 leading humble folk to imagine that there 
 is some magic pleasure in the mere pos- 
 session of vast wealth. He will overdo
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 171 
 
 things occasionally or at least Mrs. Croe- 
 sus will ; as when once she built a tempo- 
 rary ballroom next to her stately summer 
 home, at a cost so the newspapers said 
 of some forty thousand dollars, and tore 
 it down after a single evening's entertain- 
 ment. Mrs. Croesus will spend vast sums 
 of money to no rational purpose, and so 
 give the Socialists a deal to talk about, be- 
 side creating the impression that her hus- 
 band's wealth was not inherited ; but on the 
 whole she has made tremendous progress 
 since she was a schoolgirl. 
 
 Yes, despite all that we like to think to 
 the contrary, we have an upper, middle, 
 and lower class in America, but these classes 
 are quite different from the very distinct 
 strata observable in Europe. If Arnold had 
 been describing American society, it would 
 have been difficult for him to find a nomen- 
 clature so readily as he did when he de- 
 scribed the English. To a degree the metric 
 system has been adopted in the division of
 
 1 72 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 Americans into classes very much de- 
 pends on the number of ciphers to the left 
 of the decimal point. This is not to say that 
 everywhere in America a man is rated by 
 the amount of his securities that were 
 an absurd statement so long as the golden 
 dome reflects the sunlight over Beacon Hill ; 
 but from the very nature of things in a na- 
 tion whose history is essentially one of com- 
 mercial development, any line between class 
 and class must be relative to the success of 
 individuals in competing for the reward of 
 commercial supremacy; and this reward in 
 the first instance is a matter of dollars. 
 
 The history of society in America is the 
 story of workingmen rising to be employers 
 of labor, and this rise is accompanied with 
 a constantly changing standard of living; 
 children whose fathers were content with 
 rag-carpets buy, without knowledge of 
 their significance, oriental rugs, and wear 
 diamond shirt-studs. Their daughters go to 
 finishing school and take on a fine surface
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 173 
 
 polishing, their granddaughters go to col- 
 lege and learn that the color and design 
 of the ancestral rug is what constitutes its 
 distinction, not the great price which their 
 successful forebears paid for it. This is how 
 classes have grown in America, despite 
 our faith in the gospel according to Jeffer- 
 son ; and it is just this process which has 
 made Newport to-day so very different 
 from the Newport George William Curtis 
 wrote about. 
 
 I recently read a novel written twenty- 
 five years ago, describing the humiliations 
 of a Western girl, whose father was a 
 wealthy ranchman, when introduced to the 
 polite society of New York. At table she 
 never knew which fork to use, and once she 
 picked geranium leaves out of the finger- 
 bowl and pinned them to her gown. In 
 the end, of course, she learned the usages 
 of good society and married a titled 
 Englishman. The villain was a Western 
 Congressman, who chewed tobacco, and
 
 174 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 shocked but fascinated the ladies of the 
 exclusive set. This antithesis between the 
 social development of the West and the 
 East was a constant quarry for the novel- 
 writer in the last generation, and even now 
 stories of this kind are to be found on the 
 bookstands. The moral usually is that real 
 virtue is not a matter of manners and all 
 good Americans are pretty much alike 
 under the skin. Such stories illustrate the 
 fact that social classes in America are more 
 elastic than in the old world, the one merg- 
 ing imperceptibly into the other as indi- 
 viduals rise in successful competition. In 
 England a junk-dealer's clerk is certain to 
 remain a clerk until the end of his days; 
 or if, by force of ability, he should become 
 a junk-dealer, he will not change his social 
 position by a hair's breadth. In America, 
 if he has persistency, he is more than likely 
 to be the proprietor of a business; and if 
 his success be great enough, you may see 
 him occupying a box at the Newport horse-
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 175 
 
 show, or hear of his wife's brilliant enter- 
 tainments at her villa. You may not read 
 that Mrs. Blank was among the guests, 
 it was her grandfather who dealt in scrap- 
 iron, and naturally she is a bit exclusive, 
 but our junk-dealer has established 
 himself as the ancestor of some future 
 exclusive Mrs. Blank. 
 
 There is a danger in generalization, and 
 we must not infer that there is no part of 
 our American society claiming refinement 
 as its heritage, that refinement which is 
 inseparable from true nobility and finds 
 its best expression in simplicity of life and 
 character. Such society we may find en- 
 throned in the finest of the palaces which 
 front the sea at Newport ; we will find it, 
 too, in some humble home yonder in the 
 City of the Dinner-Pail. Wealth offers no 
 barrier to this society any more than pov- 
 erty is its open sesame. To the happy 
 mortals who dwell therein, money is but 
 the means to make the world a happier
 
 176 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 place in which mankind shall live. This 
 man owns a great house which overlooks 
 the sea, beautiful pictures hang upon its 
 walls, and in the library are fine books and 
 precious manuscripts. It has been his 
 pleasure to collect these masterpieces of lit- 
 erature and art ; he shares the joy of them 
 with his friends, he invites the student and 
 the connoisseur to enjoy his treasures with 
 him ; he lends his pictures to the public 
 galleries and holds his manuscripts in trust 
 for scholars ; and so his pleasure has added 
 to the public wealth as surely as the rail- 
 roads his industry has built or the mines he 
 has opened. And after the long day's work 
 in one of the countless factories which 
 the genius of this multi-millionaire has 
 created, many men and women return to 
 their quiet homes, there to enjoy the same 
 pictures and books which enrich his man- 
 sion for in this marvelous age, machin- 
 ery, so despised by some, has given to the 
 humblest citizen every means of culture.
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 177 
 
 One day during my summer on the sea- 
 girt farm, society was stirred by the arri- 
 val of a duchess who came for a visit to a 
 great house on the avenue. The next after- 
 noon many carriages stopped at the door, 
 the footmen leaving cards ; society paid its 
 call of welcome. Driving my quiet rig by 
 the house, the sound of the horse's feet 
 upon the pavement attracted attention 
 within. The great doors swung open ; two 
 flunkeys, dressed in crimson satin livery, 
 white silk stockings, golden knee-buckles, 
 and powdered wigs, stood before me ; one 
 extendeda golden salver to receive my cards, 
 but, seeing his mistake, retired. Before the 
 doors closed behind him, I glanced into 
 the great hall, down which a line of other 
 flunkeys in similar livery stood at attention. 
 Somehow that livery has remained in my 
 memory ever since. Surely, in the fifty years 
 since Mrs. Potiphar consulted the Reverend 
 Mr. Cream Cheese concerning the color 
 and cut of the Potiphar livery, Americans
 
 178 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 have made tremendous strides in dressing 
 their servants. It is not, however, the ques- 
 tionable right of Americans to the apos- 
 tolic succession of flunkeydom that keeps 
 the vision of those radiant servants in my 
 memory, but the suggestion of luxury 
 their decorous forms called up to a mind 
 filled, that afternoon, with the problems of 
 poverty, and with speculations concerning 
 the possibilities of a distribution of wealth 
 in which a living wage might be guaran- 
 teed to every able-bodied man who is will- 
 ing to work for it. 
 
 Poverty and Luxury these are the dis- 
 eases of our industrial regime, to the cure 
 of which the Socialists offer their ineffec- 
 tual remedy ; ineffectual since the popula- 
 tion of the United States is made up of 
 ninety million individuals, some of whom 
 will be forever on the verge of bank- 
 ruptcy, however great their income, and 
 some frugal and always carrying their ac- 
 count on the right side of the balance
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 179 
 
 sheet, however small their annual allot- 
 ment of wealth. 
 
 Poverty and Luxury twin diseases 
 sapping the life of society : the one destroy- 
 ing ambition by withholding sufficient 
 nourishment to the body; the other ren- 
 dering men worthless by a superabundance 
 of the good things of life. Poverty is a 
 disease not indigenous to our American 
 soil; it is a plague brought in by immi- 
 grant ships from worn-out Europe, and 
 the patients are cured here by the thou- 
 sands. So long as there remains an uncul- 
 tivated acre of land anywhere in the Union, 
 there is no real cause of poverty, nor any 
 excuse for luxury while a foot of land is 
 undeveloped. 
 
 "The extreme of luxury," De Lavelaye 
 says, " is that which destroys the product 
 of many days' labor without bringing any 
 rational satisfaction to the owner." Another 
 author calls luxury "that which creates 
 imaginary needs, exaggerates real wants,
 
 i8o THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 diverts them from their true end, estab- 
 lishes a habit of prodigality in society, and 
 offers through the senses a satisfaction of 
 self-love which puffs up, but does not nour- 
 ish the heart, and which presents to others 
 the picture of a happiness to which they 
 can never attain." 
 
 Take either definition you will, we 
 behold in the social life at Newport a 
 measure of luxury men have not wit- 
 nessed since the fall of Rome. 
 
 There was a time when economists 
 apologized for luxury on the ground that 
 those who supported it kept money in cir- 
 culation, thus benefiting the poor ; but that 
 was when scholars believed that money was 
 wealth in itself, and fondly believed that 
 one might eat his cake and have it too. 
 " Money changes hands," they said, "and 
 in this circulation the life of business and 
 commerce consists. When money is spent, 
 it is all one to the public who spends it.'* 
 We have passed beyond such specious ar-
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 181 
 
 guments, but there are those even now who 
 think if a man builds a temporary ballroom 
 and destroys it the next day, some one has 
 been benefited. The workers engaged in 
 building and demolishing it and the men 
 who employed them have, no doubt, ob- 
 tained an immediate benefit ; yet the same 
 money might have built ten houses to be 
 the homes of generations of men. Mrs. 
 Croesus has had her vanishing palace, but 
 ten families are sleeping without shelter 
 because of it. She should beg her husband 
 to use his influence at Washington to re- 
 strict immigration, or else to employ his 
 wealth in such a way that these newcom- 
 ers may be allowed to earn a proper living. 
 The sentiments which give rise to lux- 
 ury, we are told, are vanity, sensuality, and 
 the instinct of adornment ; but the greatest 
 of these is vanity, the desire to distinguish 
 one's self and to appear of more import- 
 ance than others. It is this aspect of lux- 
 ury that flaunts itself on the avenue during
 
 182 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 the season. " My owner is rich, rich, rich," 
 toots the horn of yonder marvelously 
 upholstered motor-car, as it speeds along 
 regardless of the pedestrian exercising his 
 inalienable right to cross the street. " My 
 husband is a multi-millionaire," this splen- 
 didly gowned matron declares, trailing her 
 marvelously wrought skirt in the mud as 
 she steps from her carriage, while her foot- 
 man, in a livery more splendid than that 
 of any prince in Europe, stares vacantly 
 into space and touches his shining hat. 
 Yes, these people are distinguished, but it 
 would take an exceptionally sharp eye to 
 tell which in this hierarchy of ostentation 
 is of the most importance. 
 
 Condemnation of luxury, however, is 
 not condemnation of wealth. Luxury is a 
 disease merely, which may attack the suc- 
 cessful individual just as poverty may sink 
 the unsuccessful one to lower and lower 
 depths of despair ; and is no more a neces- 
 sary result of a large income than poverty
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 183 
 
 is of a small one. The question, after all, 
 is not, how great is this man's fortune, but 
 what does he do with it ? We can make 
 no quarrel with the Captain of Industry 
 because he possesses so many dollars that 
 neither he nor a dozen clerks could count 
 them in a twelvemonth, if he has earned 
 those dollars by his skill in trade and is con- 
 scious of his stewardship. He entered the 
 race on even terms with many thousand 
 others, and outstripped them ; by the very 
 bent of his genius he is incapable of be- 
 coming a prey to luxury, and uses his 
 wealth to develop new railroads and open 
 new mines, and thus feeds with a bounti- 
 ful hand thousands of half-starved immi- 
 grants from the old world. Such a man is 
 a benefactor of mankind, as truly as the 
 greatest philanthropist. He is engaged in 
 a real service to the nation, and his great 
 fortune is the witness of his service. It has 
 become the fashion of late to belittle these 
 men of great genius and to forget the bene-
 
 1 84 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 fits which they have bestowed; but this 
 fashion will soon pass and men will again 
 restore to them the praise which is their 
 due. 
 
 When, in the economic history of man, 
 the world passed from the agricultural, 
 through the handicraft, to the industrial 
 stage, the multi-millionaire became inevit- 
 able ; when the first factory was built, the 
 "trust" was its certain result. The trust 
 and the multi-millionaire are essential fac- 
 tors in our industrial evolution, stepping- 
 stones to a new and better order. Very 
 well, you say, we will accept the multi- 
 millionaire at his real value; he is indeed 
 a necessary factor in the development of 
 our industrial world, and we will not only 
 cease to pursue him with venomous preju- 
 dice, but we will weigh carefully the find- 
 ings of investigating committees and allow 
 the rich every privilege guaranteed to the 
 humblest citizen by the Constitution. We 
 will do even more than this : we will admit
 
 THE CITY OF LUXURY 185 
 
 the right of the multi-millionaire to the 
 fruit of his industry, and allow him to keep 
 unmolested his numerous residences, his 
 horses, his motor-cars and his steam yachts. 
 But what right has his son, who never 
 earned a dollar throughout all his useless 
 days, to inherit this vast wealth ? Well, that 
 is a matter for future philosophers and 
 future statesmen to settle among themselves. 
 When the evil becomes sufficiently acute, 
 they will, no doubt, find some remedy, but 
 for the present we have more immediate 
 problems. 
 
 We do not know toward what end our 
 American Republic is moving, whether it 
 be toward that industrial state which one 
 enthusiastic young Socialist has prophesied 
 will be a reality within ten years, or 
 whether it be in quite a different direction. 
 But those who mark the course of events 
 see a mighty evolution at work in our 
 national life. On one side we behold the 
 flood of immigration typified by the Greek
 
 i86 THE CITY OF LUXURY 
 
 fisher-folk and Portuguese farm-hands, 
 working throughout the long night on 
 Brenton's Point, to win from the sea a 
 scanty pile of firewood; and on the other, 
 the lords of wealth, living in regal splen- 
 dor in the stately homes overlooking the 
 sea. The amazing natural resources of the 
 new world have brought hither these hum- 
 ble folk to a richer life than their fathers 
 ever dreamed might be, and the same nat- 
 ural resources have made possible this life 
 of splendor more vast if not more mag- 
 nificent than the world has known before. 
 What this evolution means, we shall none 
 of us live to understand ; for the American 
 nation is still in its infancy, its natural 
 resources are still undeveloped, and its 
 contribution to civilization still lies in the 
 future.
 
 Iir rutuTsi&c PITS g 
 
 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 STACK COLLECTION 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 31 1967
 
 000 719 983