The Last of the Flatboats

by George Cary Eggleston

  CHAPTER XVIII

  AT BREAKFAST

  The day was dawning by this time, and the conversation was broken up.Constant set to work to prepare breakfast while the others extinguishedthe lanterns, trimmed them, filled them with oil, and "cleaned up"generally.

  When breakfast was served, the scarcity of supplies was apparent.There were some "cold-water hoecakes,"--that is to say, bread made ofcorn-meal mixed up with cold water and a little salt, and baked in cakesabout half or three quarters of an inch thick upon a griddle. There wasa dish of fried salt pork, and with it some fried potatoes. And therewas nothing else, except a "private dish" consisting of two slices oftoast made from the scrap of stale wheat bread left, with a poached eggon each of them. There was no coffee and no butter, the last remains ofthat having been used upon the toast.

  The "private dish," Constant explained, was for Ed. "You see, we'reout to get him well, and his digestive apparatus doesn't take kindlyto fried things. I've saved four more eggs for him--the last we'vegot,--and six more slices of stale wheat bread. The rest of you arebarbarians, and you'll wrestle with any sort of hash I can get up tillwe get to Memphis."

  Ed protested vigorously against the favoritism shown him, but the otherssupported Constant's plan, and the older boy had to yield.

  "Well, I am deeply grateful for your kindness, boys," he said, "and I'mduly grateful also to the thousands of men in various parts of thecountry who have worked so hard to furnish me with these two slices oftoast."

  The boys looked up from their plates.

  "Here's another revelation," said Irv. "My ill-furnished intelligence isabout to receive another supply of much-needed rudimentary information.Go on, Ed. Tell us about it. How in the world do you figure out your'thousands' of men who have had anything to do with those two slices oftoast?"

  "Oh, that was a joke," said Will.

  "It was nothing of the kind," answered Ed. "I can't possibly count upall the people who have worked hard to give me this toast, but theycertainly number greatly more than a thousand."

  "We're only waiting for wisdom to drop from your lips--" began Irv, withhis drawl.

  "O, quit it, Irv!" said Phil; "you'll learn more by listening than bytalking."

  "That is probably so," said the other, "though I remember that we heardsomething away up the river, about how much a person learns of a subjectby talking about it."

  "Yes, but--"

  "Listen," said Ed, "and I'll explain. The wheat out of which this toastwas made was grown probably in Dakota or Minnesota. There was a farmerthere, and perhaps there were some farm-hands also, who ploughed theground, sowed the seed, reaped the wheat, threshed it, winnowed it, andall that. Then--"

  "Yes, but all that wouldn't include more than half a dozen," said Phil.

  "Yes, it would," said Irv, "for there's all the womenfolk who cookedthe men's meals and--"

  "Never mind them," said Ed, "though of course they helped to give me mytoast. Let's count only those that contributed directly to that kindlyend. These farmer people used ploughs, harrows, drills, reapers,threshing-machines, wagons, and all that, and somebody must have madethem. And back of those who made them were those who dug the iron forthem out of the ground, and cut the wood in them out of the forest, andthe men who made the tools with which they did all this, and--"

  "I see," said Irv. "It's the biggest endless chain imaginable.Thousands? Why, thousands had a hand in it before you even get to thefarmer--the men who made the tools, and the men who made the tools thatmade the tools, and so on back to the very beginnings of creation. Andif we face about, there are the men that ran the railroads which hauledthe wheat to mill, and the millers, and all that. Oh, the thousand areeasy enough to make out."

  "Yes," said Ed, "and then the railroads and the mills had to be built.The men that built them, the engineers, mechanics, and laborers, allhelped to give me my two slices of toast. So did the men behind them,the men who made their tools and their materials, the woodsmen whochopped trees for ties, the miners who dug the iron, the smelters, thepuddlers, the rolling-mill men, who wrought the crude ore into steelrails; then there are all the men who made the locomotives, and thecars, and the machinery of the mills, and--"

  "Oh, stop for mercy's sake," said Will. "It's no use to count. Therearen't thousands, but millions of them. And of course the same thing istrue of our clothes, our shoes, and everything else."

  "But with so many people's work represented in it," asked Irv,reflectively, "why isn't that piece of toast an enormously costlyaffair?"

  "Simply _because_ so many people's work is represented in it," answeredEd. "If one man had to do it all for himself, it would never be done atall. Just imagine a man set down on the earth with no tools and nobodyto help him. How much buttered toast do you suppose he would be able toturn out in a year? Why, before he could get so much as a hoe he wouldhave to travel hundreds of miles, dig some iron and coal, cut wood withwhich to convert the coal into coke, melt the iron out of its ore,change it into steel, and shape it into a hoe. Why, even a hoe wouldcost him a year's hard work or more, while a wagon he could hardly makewithout tools in a lifetime. Now he can earn the price of a hoe in a fewhours, and the cost of a wagon in a few days or weeks, simply becauseeverybody works for everybody else, each man doing only the thing thathe can do best."

  "Then we all work for each other without knowing it," said Will.

  "Of course we do. When we fellows were diving for that pig-iron, we wereworking for the thousands of people who will use or profit by the thingsthat somebody else will make out of that pig-iron and--"

  "And for the somebody else," said Irv, "that will make those things outof the pig-iron, and for all the 'somebody elses' that work for them,and so on in every direction! Whew! it makes my head swim to think ofit. But what a nabob you are, Ed! Just think! Thousands and evenmillions of people are, at this moment, at work to make youcomfortable!"

  "Yes, and each one of the millions is at work for all the others whileall the others are at work for him. Theorists sometimes dream outsystems of 'cooeperative industry,' hoping in that way to better men'scondition. But their very wildest dreams do not even approach thecomplex and perfectly working cooeperation we already have in use."

  "Just think of it!" said Irv. "Suppose that every man in our little townof two or three thousand people had to do everything for himself! Hewould have to raise sheep for wool, card, spin, and weave it, andfashion it into clothes. He would have to raise cotton and linen in thesame way, and cattle too, and keep a tannery and be a shoemaker and afarmer and a mason and a carpenter and all the rest of it. And then hewould have to mine his own iron and coal, and make his own toolsand--well, he wouldn't do it, because he couldn't. He'd just wander offinto the woods hunting for something that he could kill and eat, andhe'd try to kill anybody else that did the same thing, for fear that thesomebody else would get some of the game that he wanted for himself.He'd be simply a savage!"

  "Well, but even savages go in tribes and hunt together and livetogether," said Will.

  "Of course they do," answered Ed, "and that's their first step up towardcivilization. When they do that they have learned in a small way theadvantage of working together, each for all and all for each. The betterthey learn that lesson, the more civilized they become."

  "Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything andeverybody to work for the state and be supported by it?" asked Phil.

  "Not a little bit of it," said Ed. "That would be simply to go back tothe tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize theadvantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. Wehave worked out of that and into something better. With us, every manworks for all the rest by working for himself in the way that bestserves his own welfare. Under our system every man is urged andstimulated by self-interest to do the very best and most work that hecan. Under a communistic or socialistic or tribal system, every manwould be as lazy as the rest would let him be, because he would be sureof a share in all th
at the others might make by their labor. It issharp competition that makes men do their best. It is in the 'strugglefor existence' that men advance most rapidly."

  "Wonder if that wasn't what Humboldt meant," said Irv, "when he calledthe banana 'the curse of the tropics,' adding that when a man plantedone banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendantsto the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessityfor clothes."

  "Exactly," said Ed. "Somebody once said that 'every man is as lazy as hedares to be.'"

  "Well, I am, anyhow," yawned Irv, "and so I'm going up on deck under theawning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night."