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The Workers

be capable of no other than unskilled la-
bor, but why should we be doomed to per-
form it under the conditions which now
degrade us at our work?

are

Imagine each of us an ideal workman. Through all the hours of the working-day we labor conscientiously, with no need of oversight beyond intelligent direction; for each of us feels the keenest interest in the progress of the work, because we honest men, and, with far-sighted knowledge, we know that by our best labor in any form of useful production we are contributing our best to the general prosperity, as well as our own, and that it is by our energy and personal efficiency that we may open for ourselves a way to promotion. Here clearly is a solution on ideal grounds. Is there no remedy that

can reach us as we are?

Our ambition must be fired, our sense of responsibility awakened and enlisted in our labor, our intelligences quickened to the vision of our own interests in the best performance of our duty. not be rendered frictionless thereby. Work Life will will still be hard, but to it will be restored its dignity, its power to call into play the better part of a man, and so build up his character.

We have already seen how such an end is realized in the initial betterment of character itself. Let us see whether something might not be done by an initial improvement in the conditions of employment.

Let us suppose now that we are not ideal characters, but ordinary men, whose lot in life is to perform unskilled labor; but let us suppose that we are an organized body of workmen. The contractor made terms with us as an organized gang for the removal of the old building. Our organization, from long experience of such work, was able to enter into an eminently fair agreement. The contract rests upon a basis of time. For the completed work we are to receive a fixed sum, provided that it is finished by a given date. If we finish the work, according to the terms of the contract, one week earlier, we are to receive a bonus in addition to the fixed amount; if two weeks earlier, there will be an increase in the bonus. In the meantime advances are to be made to us, week by week, in the form of days' wages, but so regulated as to protect the contractor

against loss if the gang should fail to complete the work.

Every member of the gang is perfectly and knows thoroughly the advantages of familiar with the terms of the contract, an early completion of the job. We agree among ourselves upon the number of hours which shall constitute a day's work, and from our own numbers we elect a boss, under whose orders we bind ourselves to who will give direction to our labor, and serve. It is no part of his duty now to stand guard over us in the office of a slavefectually perform that service for ourdriver to prevent our shirking, for we efselves, seeing to it, with utmost regard for our interests, that no man among us fails to do his share in the common task. The boss is now the best and most intelhe direct our efforts, but, with his own ligent worker among us, and not only does hand, he sets the example of energetic work for the securing of the best terms that the contract offers for our common good.

It is ours. In a true sense now we have got a job. The work is hard, but we have of labor is not a listless, time-serving econan object in working hard. Every stroke furthering of the work toward its compleomy of effort, but an eager and willing tion and our own advantage. We are glad in the progress of our job, even if we are glad from no higher motive than our persibility and the keen interest which comes sonal profit. We have a sense of responof that, even if they rise in no better source than our greed for gain.

deeper than this. It is true that the root of the matter lies hopefuller conditions and be, intrinsically, We may work under no better men. Our selfishness may take merely seeks our own in the welfare of on the refinement of the altruism that others; our ignorance may become illumined by an enlightened self-interest; our vices may assume respectability; and yet possession of us. our old hardness of heart remain in full question is this:-Nearest to which of But the truly pertinent these ways of living lies the living way? In which have we the better chance to become better men? Life in its present age. course is to most of us a miserable bondtion; and, with no power left for mental We work daily to physical exhaus

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A weird procession, this fragment of a company in the ranks of labor.-Page 286.

The Workers

effort, our minds yield themselves to the
play of any chance diversion until they lose
the power of serious attention.
constitutes for us the work of life there is
In what
no pleasure, no education, no evoking of

our better natures.

All truly productive labor performed under right conditions is itself a blessing. It partakes of the highest good that life offers. It is a bringing of order out of chaos, a victory over forces which can be reduced from evil mastery to useful service. It thus becomes the type of that labor which is the work of life, the mastery of self in the building of character. In this sense it was that the monks of the Middle Ages framed their motto, Laborare est Orare-labor is prayer. of its true conditions and reduced to the But robbed dishonor of time-service under the eye of a slave-driving boss, who impels us with insults infinitely more degrading than the lash, labor is no longer prayer, but a blasphemy, which finds expression in the words which rise readiest to our lips.

I have been writing from the position of an unskilled workman, with no apparent allowance for my newness to the life. The physical stress and strain, for example, how different my experience of these as compared with that of the other men inured to them by long habit ! or two of such labor, and how great the A year physical change! My hands would be hard, and the friction of this work, so far from wounding them, would render them the more impervious to harm. cles would be like iron, and would lend My musthemselves with far greater ease to the stress of manual labor. Ten years would find me a seasoned workman.

But under conditions of labor such as these, what changes other than physical would there be? My body might be hardened in fibre to the point of high efficiency in manual labor, but the hardening of mind and character-is it likely that this would be of the nature of the strength of more abundant life, or of the hardness of petrifaction?

I have received the strangest kindness from the men, the most tactful treatment of me as a novice. They laughed at my strenuous efforts to do what was so much easier to them, and they laughed when the boss singled me out for abuse, but never

ill-naturedly, I thought. And those who made up to me, and with whom I picked sideration. They never pressed me with up acquaintance, showed the kindest conembarrassing questions, but fell gracefully tory hand or a "tradesman" out of a job. into the easy assumption that I was a facIt was natural to adopt the general strain and speak of plans which involved my going West.

In spite of their roughness and hardness of manner and speech, one never felt had a growing feeling that their better the smallest fear of these men, and you natures were never far to seek. in reality here they were, a cursing, blasAnd yet pheming crew; men upon whose lives idea of work is a slavish drudgery done hopelessness seems to have settled; whose from the instinct of self-preservation and to be shirked whenever possible; whose idea of pleasure is abandonment to their unmastered passions.

I had a purpose in quitting work in the my lodgings and asked Mrs. Flaherty for middle of Saturday afternoon. I went to give me without trouble. Then I brushed an early supper of anything that she could myself as presentable as my slender pack my clothes and washed myself, and made permitted. My beard was now of nearly burned by the sun, and my clothes, in two weeks' growth, and my face was well spite of the protection of overalls, were much labor-stained.

I felt some security in my disguise, and the sunset parade. On the road I met the after an early supper I walked over to see men returning from the works, and had to run a gauntlet of questions as to whether I had left the job for good, and what I meant to do.

ning to and fro of cadets, who appeared to
There was bustle in the camp; a run-
be subject to many calls; a nervous ap-
pearing and vanishing at the tent-doors of
figures which were in process of achieving
parade-dress; a hasty personal inspection
of arms and uniform; and then suddenly,
there emerged, without a trace of disorder,
out of apparently inextricable confusion,
fect symmetry, before the inspecting of-
the two companies, in double lines of per-
ficer.

ed on the benches under the trees, and
Then followed the sunset parade. Seat-

66

grouped on the turf behind, was an eager crowd watching intently, in perfect still ness, every evolution of the cadets. The fascination was in the sense it gave you of abounding life, of youth and strength and vigor, brought to perfect unity in willing subordination to authority. Here was the type of highest organization, the voluntary submission of those who are fit to follow to those who are fittest to lead." So much has civilization achieved for the purpose of self-defence. The mission of many of these young officers will be to take such men as those with whom I have been working, and teach them the manly lesson of obedience, and awaken in them the feelings of courage and loyalty and esprit de corps. Civilization is yet a long way from such organization for industrial ends, if ever such corporate action will be possible or good; but certainly it will not be long before civilization gives birth in increasing numbers to "captains of industry," who will feel with their men other ties than the "nexus of cash payment," and who will attack the problems of production with other aims than selfish accumulation. Under the direction of such leaders, working-men will be led to far greater conquests over the resources of nature than any in the past, and, sharing consciously in these victories as the fruits of their own labors, there will open to them a new life of liberty and hope in willing allegiance to true control.

The intense satisfaction I felt in the rest of yesterday (Sunday) was heightened by a feeling of hopefulness as I thought of the future of working-men in a country like ours. Here are almost boundless natural resources, capable of supporting many times our present population. Under the stimulus of private accumulation, what

marvellous genius and skill and enterprise have directed labor to the development of our national wealth! When, with the growth of better knowledge, there is added to this stimulus among the great leaders of industry a sincere desire for the common good and a purpose to make the conditions of employment the means of achieving this good, how far greater must be the industrial results, and how far better the lives of the workers!

I felt aglow with this idea as I walked, in the afternoon, down the road below Highland Falls. It was a warm mid-summer day, and in keeping with its restful quiet the air moved gently among the leaves in the tree-tops. I was disturbed by the sound of music from the deck of an excursion steamer, and, seized with sudden desire for a glimpse of the river, I vaulted a low stone wall, and quickly made my way over the mossy carpeting of a wood which covers the bluff above the water.

I did not see, at first, the abrupt ending of the wood and the sweep of an open lawn, and when I caught sight of that I was only a few yards from a rustic bench. There two persons sat, with their backs toward me, but I recognized the girl at once as an acquaintance, and I knew that I was a trespassing vagrant. The man I knew well, for he was a college classmate and a charming fellow, and I longed to ask his views on the question of the improvement of the lot of unskilled laborers by means of organization.

But I grew painfully conscious of my work-stained clothes, and my faded flannel shirt, and the holes in my old felt hat, and of how all these marked me as belonging now to another world. And so I quietly stole away and returned to people."

(To be continued.)

"mine own

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It was a special-delivery letter, and Leroy, after he had receipted for it and the boy's red wheel was twinkling down the street, eyed the superscription a moment before he took out his pocket-knife and very neatly opened the envelope.

The time was five o'clock of a Saturday afternoon. The foreman in the foundry at Cochrane's always came home earlier Saturdays, the whistle blowing release at four. Harry had come up on the cars, and was resting a moment on his piazza before cleaning himself for supper. was tired with a hard, warm, dirty day's He work; and he waited a moment in a pleasant daze, conscious of the splash of the improvised hose fountain on the green plush

of the tiny lawn, of the rich colors of the the shifting of the burnished greens of the cannas in the pyramid near the house, of oak-trees under a light breeze, of the soft blending and melting of many hues in the street before him, of the flowers and shrubs angles made on either hand by the shady in the yards and the fanciful architecture of the wooden houses, of the rattle of passing vehicles over the brick pavement, and the noiseless flash of bicycles. The Leroys owned their house, a new house, painted They were very proud of the house. Years cream color, with gables and a large piazza. had been spent planning it. There were and a bath-room, upstairs. When Harry as many as three large closets, and a garret,

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