“I like to free my mind of cant,” he said, with a short laugh, “when I can afford it, and I propose to cast all sorts of American cant out of it in answering your question. The economic status of the working-man among us is essentially the same as that of the working-man all over the civilized world. You will find plenty of people here, especially about election time, to tell you differently, but they will not be telling you the truth, though a great many of them think they are. In fact, I suppose most Americans honestly believe because we have a republican form of government, and manhood suffrage, and so on, that our economic conditions are peculiar, and that our working-man has a status higher and better than that of the working-man anywhere else. But he has nothing of the kind. His circumstances are better, and provisionally his wages are higher, but it is only a question of years or decades when his circumstances will be the same and his wages the same as the European working-man’s. There is nothing in our conditions to prevent this.”
“Yes, I understood from our friend here,” said the Altrurian, nodding toward me, “that you had broken only with the political tradition of Europe in your Revolution; and he has explained to me that you do not hold all kinds of labor in equal esteem; but—”
“What kind of labor did he say we did hold in esteem?” asked the banker.
“Why, I understood him to say that if America meant anything at all it meant the honor of work, but that you distinguished and did not honor some kinds of work so much as others; for instance, domestic service, or personal attendance of any kind.”
The banker laughed again. “Oh, he drew the line there, did he? Well, we all have to draw the line somewhere. Our friend is a novelist, and I will tell you in strict confidence that the line he has drawn is imaginary. We don’t honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow gets up, the papers make a great ado over his having been a woodchopper or a bobbin-boy, or something of that kind, but I doubt if the fellow himself likes it; he doesn’t if he’s got any sense. The rest of us feel that it’s infra dig., and hope nobody will find out that we ever worked with our hands for a living. I’ll go further,” said the banker, with the effect of whistling prudence down the wind, “and I will challenge any of you to gainsay me from his own experience or observation. How does esteem usually express itself? When we wish, to honor a man, what do we do?”
“Ask him to dinner,” said the lawyer.
“Exactly. We offer him some sort of social recognition. Well, as soon as a fellow gets up, if he gets up high enough, we offer him some sort of social recognition; in fact, all sorts; but upon condition that he has left off working with his hands for a living. We forgive all you please to his past on account of the present. But there isn’t a working-man, I venture to say, in any city or town, or even large village, in the whole length and breadth of the United States who has any social recognition, if he is still working at his trade. I don’t mean, merely, that he is excluded from rich and fashionable society, but from the society of the average educated and cultivated people. I’m not saying he is fit for it; but I don’t care how intelligent and agreeable he might be — and some of them are astonishingly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind and their original way of looking at things that I like nothing better than to talk with them — all of our invisible fences are up against him.”
The minister said: “I wonder if that sort of exclusiveness is quite natural? Children seem to feel no sort of social difference among themselves.”
“We can hardly go to children for a type of social order,” the professor suggested.
“True,” the minister meekly admitted. “But somehow there is a protest in us somewhere against these arbitrary distinctions — something that questions whether they are altogether right. We know that they must be, and always have been, and always will be, and yet — well, I will confess it — I never feel at peace when I face them.”
“Oh,” said the banker, “if you come to the question of right and wrong, that is another matter. I don’t say it’s right. I’m not discussing that question; though I’m certainly not proposing to level the fences; I should be the last to take my own down. I say simply that you are no more likely to meet a working-man in American society than you are to meet a colored man. Now you can judge,” he ended, turning directly to the Altrurian, “how much we honor labor. And I hope I have indirectly satisfied your curiosity as to the social status of the working-man among us.”
We were all silent.
Perhaps the others were occupied like myself in trying to recall some instance of a working-man whom they had met in society, and perhaps we said nothing because we all failed.
The Altrurian spoke at last.
“You have been so very full and explicit that I feel as if it were almost unseemly to press any further inquiry; but I should very much like to know how your working-men bear this social exclusion.”
“I’m sure I can’t say,” returned the banker. “A man does not care much to get into society until he has something to eat, and how to get that is always the first question with the working-man.”
“But you wouldn’t like it yourself?”
“No, certainly, I shouldn’t like it myself. I shouldn’t complain of not being asked to people’s houses, and the working-men don’t; you can’t do that; but I should feel it an incalculable loss. We may laugh at the emptiness of society, or pretend to be sick of it, but there is no doubt that society is the flower of civilization, and to be shut out from it is to be denied the best privilege of a civilized man. There are society women — we have all met them — whose graciousness and refinement of presence are something of incomparable value; it is more than a liberal education to have been admitted to it, but it is as inaccessible to the working-man as — what shall I say? The thing is too grotesquely impossible for any sort of comparison. Merely to conceive of its possibility is something that passes a joke; it is a kind of offence.”
Again we were silent.
“I don’t know,” the banker continued, “how the notion of our social equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality. As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West and among the gold-hunters of California. It was not dreamed of in our colonial society, either in Virginia or Pennsylvania or New York or Massachusetts; and the fathers of the republic, who were mostly slave-holders, were practically as stiff-necked aristocrats as any people of their day. We have not a political aristocracy, that is all; but there is as absolute a division between the orders of men and as little love, in this country as in any country on the globe. The severance of the man who works for his living with his hands from the man who does not work for his living with his hands is so complete, and apparently so final, that nobody even imagines anything else, not even in fiction. Or, how is that?” he asked, turning to me. “Do you fellows still put the intelligent, high-spirited, handsome young artisan, who wins the millionaire’s daughter, into your books? I used sometimes to find him there.”
“You might still find him in the fiction of the weekly story-papers; but,” I was obliged to own, “he would not go down with my readers. Even in the story-paper fiction he would leave off working as soon as he married the millionaire’s daughter, and go to Europe, or he would stay here and become a social leader, but he would not receive working-men in his gilded halls.”
The others rewarded my humor with a smile, but the banker said: “Then I wonder you were not ashamed of filling our friend up with that stuff about our honoring some kinds of labor. It is true that we don’t go about openly and explicitly despising any kind of honest toil — people don’t do that anywhere now; but we contemn it in terms quite as unmistakable. The working-man acquiesces as completely as anybody else. He does not remain a working-man a moment longer that he can help; and after he gets up, if he is weak enough to be proud of having been one, it is because he
feels that his low origin is a proof of his prowess in rising to the top against unusual odds. I don’t suppose there is a man in the whole civilized world — outside of Altruria, of course — who is proud of working at a trade, except the shoemaker Tolstoy, and is a count, and he does not make very good shoes.”
We all laughed again: those shoes of Count Tolstoy’s are always such an infallible joke.
The Altrurian, however, was cocked and primed with another question; he instantly exploded it: “But are all the working-men in America eager to rise above their condition? Is there none willing to remain among the mass because the rest could not rise with him, and from the hope of yet bringing labor to honor?”
The banker answered: “I never heard of any. No, the American ideal is not to change the conditions for all, but for each to rise above the rest if he can.”
“Do you think it is really so bad as that?” asked the minister, timidly.
The banker answered: “Bad? Do you call that bad? I thought it was very good. But, good or bad, I don’t think you’ll find it deniable, if you look into the facts. There may be working-men willing to remain so for other working-men’s sake, but I have never met any — perhaps because the working-man never goes into society.”
The unfailing question of the Altrurian broke the silence which ensued: “Are there many of your working-men who are intelligent and agreeable — of the type you mentioned a moment since?”
“Perhaps,” said the banker, “I had better refer you to one of our friends here, who has had a great deal more to do with them than I have. He is a manufacturer, and he has had to do with all kinds of work-people.”
“Yes, for my sins,” the manufacturer assented; and he added: “They are often confoundedly intelligent, though I haven’t often found them very agreeable, either in their tone of mind or their original way of looking at things.”
The banker amiably acknowledged his thrust, and the Altrurian asked: “Ah, they are opposed to your own?”
“Well, we have the same trouble here that you must have heard of in England. As you know now that the conditions are the same here, you won’t be surprised at the fact.”
“But the conditions,” the Altrurian pursued— “do you expect them always to continue the same?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the manufacturer. “We can’t expect them to change of themselves, and I shouldn’t know how to change them. It was expected that the rise of the trusts and the syndicates would break the unions, but somehow they haven’t. The situation remains the same. The unions are not cutting one another’s throats now any more than we are. The war is on a larger scale — that’s all.”
“Then let me see,” said the Altrurian, “whether I clearly understand the situation as regards the working-man in America. He is dependent upon the employer for his chance to earn a living, and he is never sure of this. He may be thrown out of work by his employer’s disfavor or disaster, and his willingness to work goes for nothing; there is no public provision of work for him; there is nothing to keep him from want nor the prospect of anything.”
“We are all in the same boat,” said the professor.
“But some of us have provisioned ourselves rather better and can generally weather it through till we are picked up,” the lawyer put in.
“I am always saying the working-man is improvident,” returned the professor.
“There are the charities,” the minister suggested.
“But his economical status,” the Altrurian pursued, “is in a state of perpetual uncertainty, and to save himself in some measure he has organized, and so has constituted himself a danger to the public peace?”
“A very great danger,” said the professor.
“I guess we can manage him,” the manufacturer remarked.
“And socially he is non-existent?”
The Altrurian turned with this question to the banker, who said: “He is certainly not in society.”
“Then,” said my guest, “if the working-man’s wages are provisionally so much better here than in Europe, why should they be discontented? What is the real cause of their discontent?”
I have always been suspicious, in the company of practical men, of an atmosphere of condescension to men of my calling, if nothing worse. I fancy they commonly regard artists of all kinds as a sort of harmless eccentrics, and that literary people they look upon as something droll, as weak and soft, as not quite right. I believed that this particular group, indeed, was rather abler to conceive of me as a rational person than most others, but I knew that if even they had expected me to be as reasonable as themselves they would not have been greatly disappointed if I were not; and it seemed to me that I had put myself wrong with them in imparting to the Altrurian that romantic impression that we hold labor in honor here. I had really thought so, but I could not say so now, and I wished to retrieve myself somehow. I wished to show that I was a practical man, too, and so I made answer: “What is the cause of the working-man’s discontent? It is very simple: the walking delegate.”
IV
I suppose I could not have fairly claimed any great originality for my notion that the walking delegate was the cause of the labor troubles: he is regularly assigned as the reason of a strike in the newspapers, and is reprobated for his evil agency by the editors, who do not fail to read the working-men many solemn lessons and fervently warn them against him, as soon as the strike begins to go wrong — as it nearly always does. I understand from them that the walking delegate is an irresponsible tyrant, who emerges from the mystery that habitually hides him and from time to time orders a strike in mere rancor of spirit and plenitude of power, and then leaves the working-men and their families to suffer the consequences, while he goes off somewhere and rolls in the lap of luxury, careless of the misery he has created. Between his debauches of vicious idleness and his accesses of baleful activity he is employed in poisoning the mind of the working-men against his real interests and real friends. This is perfectly easy, because the American working-man, though singularly shrewd and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and real friends — or, at least, from knowing them when he sees them.
There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person that the walking delegate was the source of the discontent among our proletariate, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval of the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit the nail on the head this time; and the minister seemed to be freshly impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my chagrin, broke into a laugh. “I’m afraid,” he said, with a sardonic levity which surprised me, “you’ll have to go a good deal deeper than the walking delegate. He’s a symptom; he isn’t the disease. The thing keeps on and on, and it seems to be always about wages; but it isn’t about wages at the bottom. Some of those fellows know it and some of them don’t, but the real discontent is with the whole system, with the nature of things. I had a curious revelation on that point the last time I tried to deal with my men as a union. They were always bothering me about this and about that, and there was no end to the bickering. I yielded point after point, but it didn’t make any difference. It seemed as if the more I gave the more they asked. At last I made up my mind to try to get at the real inwardness of the matter, and I didn’t wait for their committee to come to me — I sent for their leading man, and said I wanted to have it out with him. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and when I got at him, man to man that way, I found he had sense, and he had ideas — it’s no use pretending those fellows are fools; he had thought about his side of the question, anyway. I said: ‘Now what does it all mean? Do you want the earth, or don’t you? When is it going to end?’ I offered him something to take, but he said he didn’t drink, and we compromised on cigars. ‘Now when is it going to end?’ said I, and I p
ressed it home, and wouldn’t let him fight off from the point. ‘Do you mean when is it all going to end?’ said he. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘all. I’m sick of it. If there’s any way out I’d like to know it.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I’ll tell you, if you want to know. It’s all going to end when you get the same amount of money for the same amount of work as we do.’”
We all laughed uproariously. The thing was deliciously comical; and nothing, I thought, attested the Altrurian’s want of humor like his failure to appreciate this joke. He did not even smile in asking: “And what did you say?”
“Well,” returned the manufacturer, with cosey enjoyment, “I asked him if the men would take the concern and run it themselves.” We laughed again; this seemed even better than the other joke. “But he said, ‘No’; they would not like to do that. And then I asked him just what they would like, if they could have their own way, and he said they would like to have me run the business, and all share alike. I asked him what was the sense of that, and why, if I could do something that all of them put together couldn’t do, I shouldn’t be paid more than all of them put together; and he said that if a man did his best he ought to be paid as much as the best man. I asked him if that was the principle their union was founded on, and he said, ‘Yes,’ that the very meaning of their union was the protection of the weak by the strong and the equalization of earnings among all who do their best.”
We waited for the manufacturer to go on, but he made a dramatic pause at this point, as if to let it sink into our minds; and he did not speak until the Altrurian prompted him with the question, “And what did you finally do?”
“I saw there was only one way out for me, and I told the fellow I did not think I could do business on that principle. We parted friends, but the next Saturday I locked them out and smashed their union. They came back, most of them — they had to — but I’ve treated with them ever since ‘as individuals.’”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 561
