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Page 66
* * * * *
A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never
believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys
and virtues are the _essential_ part of life's business, but it is sure
that _some_ positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If
it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees
it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see
it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.
It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your
college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar
of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make a combination of two
things in judging the total significance of a human being. We feel it
to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be
calculated) of his inner virtue _and_ his outer place,--neither singly
taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for
life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They
_must_ be significant elements of the world as well.
Just test Tolsto�'s deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts.
This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer
in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the
spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to
belong:--
"The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown
men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell
to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each
day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular
strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under
peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no
reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a
'reserve price.' We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent
hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as
hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting
this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our
labor.
"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly
get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is
secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He
has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us
all when the d�bris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from
us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and
collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to
exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not
be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take
our places.
"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,--that we have sold our
labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it
where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all
the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we
shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to
us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility
of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of
interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility,
none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding
toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
the end.
"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no
certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves,
we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be
driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren,
hopeless lives."
And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which
one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it
because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his
polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is
it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible,
and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been
reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery
to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?
Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude,
and are always counted to its credit,--read the records of missionary
devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then,
taken by itself,--no, nor all of them together,--that make such a life
undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do
the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures.
Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was
too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.
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