Читать книгу The Story of a Working Man's Life - Francis Mason - Страница 10

Table of Contents

WHEN I had mastered the "Rule of Three," I thought I knew enough of science, and persuaded my parents to allow me to try and do something in the world. I was pretty well read in the old authors, and longed to be a man. For several years both before and after this period, the strongest desire in my heart was the desire to be a man. I was impatient of restraint, and wished to leap over youth into manhood at one spring. Had there been a reform movement to ignore the boy and vote all the boys men, I should have been a leader in it.

It is this desire, more than all other causes combined, which fills our cities with newsboys, shoeblacks, pedlars, porters, and the like. They do not want situations where they will be under control; they have no wish to be apprenticed to anything. They want to be men, and if they cannot be that just now, they are determined to be free, if not like men, at least like the wild ass of the desert. They mean to call no man master. These boys, when they get adrift are the most difficult class in society to deal with, because nothing will subdue them excepting patient kindness, a scarce article in the market.

Knowledge is power, money is power, but kindness is a power more powerful than either, because it can move the human heart; and especially the hearts of children. So long as the love of Christ can prostrate the walls of brass around the hardened sinner's heart, just so long will love and Christian kindness have power to reform the fatherless and motherless and friendless little ones that "infest" the streets of our cities.

But in one view, I never was a boy, the cares of manhood rested so soon on my young shoulders.

My father usually put his earnings into the hands of my mother, and left her to make the best disposition of them she could. His mind was almost always occupied with some literary work or another.

Sometimes he would be turning over a puzzling question about to be discussed in a debating society in which it was arranged he should take part; sometimes he had a poem on hand; sometimes he was preparing a speech for a public meeting, and when Saturday night came and the work of the week was finished, he often had to get a sermon ready to preach the next day.

The commissariat department was left to my mother, and it often required a great knowledge of figures, and something more, to make the appropriations meet the expenditures. As she had no one else with whom to consult, she early acquired the habit of taking counsel with her oldest boy Frank, and Frank as early learned to give it, whether he understood the merits of the case or not.

I furnished my mother with a good deal of information concerning the outside world, of which she must have remained in ignorance but for me. I knew the prices of a given article at twenty different shops; and if a "cheap shop" was opened in town, I as good as telegraphed it to my mother, as soon as the notice was up.

After the wages were paid on Saturday evening, about seven o'clock, I often had one of the hardest day's works in the week to do, running all over town till near midnight. But I always did it readily and cheerfully. I never felt the labor hard, because it was for my mother, whom I intensely loved, which made it a pleasure to do anything to lighten her labors. I went up and down the dark lanes and alleys, and through the midst of crowded thoroughfares where thieves and pickpockets are said to abound, but never lost anything by them. I bought all sorts of things here and there, had all sorts of packages in my pockets, and under my arms, and in my hands, but when I got home I never missed one.

Thus the careless, joyous days of boyhood I never knew. Instead of spinning tops, I was always thinking of how to turn a penny for mother; and instead of playing marbles, I was rambling over the market to see where potatoes were cheapest, and where the largest bunches of radishes could be obtained for a halfpenny.

Since I could not become a man, I concluded to become an errand-boy, and help mother with my wages. That was decidedly preferable to the absolute government to which I was subjected in school. I had read not a little history and not a few novels, but had never met with anything so intensely arbitrary as "our school."

I obtained a situation in an extensive boot and shoe manufactory in the city, and I found the proprietor a kind old man. He never once found fault with me all the time I was with him. Kindness has more power than stripes. Bring flowers to his grave, because he was kind! I think he must have loved the Lord Jesus Christ, because he was kind; but I know not what his creed was, nor whether he had any creed at all. I thought him one of the best of Christians because he was kind. I have since studied theology, and the original Scriptures, and Exegesis, and the German commentators, and learned more of the value of creeds; but I still look for Christianity under the garb of kindness.

My employer had risen from small beginnings till he had become a rich man, and was then a member of the city government. To each of his two sons he had given a classical education, and for the eldest he had succeeded in obtaining a commission in the army. While I was there he returned home temporarily, a captain in charge of a recruiting depot.

His other son had been educated for the law, but fell into intemperate habits, and all the efforts of his father and brother to reform him were unavailing. He finally enlisted in the East Indian artillery, and there was in York the unexampled sight of one brother a captain in Wellington's army, and the other a private in the service of the East India Company.

The old man had married a young wife in his latter days who was a great novel-reader, and, being errand-boy, she constantly sent me backwards and forwards to the circulating library. On one Saturday, I had been sent on several errands, and, among others, to the library, where I was detained an unreasonable time to get my books changed, because many others were there before me.

On my return, I was met by the lady at the door, and she said: "You must not on any account tell Mr. Gill where you have been detained, because he does not like me to read novels, and does not know that I borrow books from the library at all. If he chances to see one about, I tell him I had it from a friend. So you must not tell him you have been to the library." Had he questioned me, I should have assuredly told him the whole truth, but nothing more was said to me by any one on the subject.

This lady had all the aids that money can give to make her happy, and had she, instead of reading novels, read books of another class, she might have been induced to spend her spare time in administering to the happiness of the wives and daughters of the forty workmen her husband employed; and then she would have been made happy by the reflex influences of making others happy. The loss was greater to herself than it was to her neglected sisters. Reading novels, like smoking opium, creates beatific visions, which die away like the colors on soap bubbles, and leave the reader wretched and dissatisfied.

The result of novel-reading in this instance was that she habitually deceived her husband, and had to make a confidant of her errand-boy, who despised her for it, and confessed to him that she told falsehoods, and sought to avoid exposure by tempting him to tell falsehoods for her. Though surrounded by every comfort, she must have been more miserable at heart than the poorest honest shoe-binder that came to her husband's store.

When the time came for me to choose a trade, I wished to be a printer, because I thought I should thereby have free access to books; and books I coveted beyond all other things. A large library of miscellaneous literature, with leisure to read, seemed to me an earthly paradise. I read up everything that came in my way, excepting such books as Milton's "Paradise Lost," Dryden's "Virgil," and Pope's "Homer;" these, when a boy, I could never read; but Shakspeare, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, Swift, Sterne, Smollett, Fielding, and a host of other old writers, novelists, essayists and poets, I reveled in.

The printers, however, all demanded a bonus of ten pounds when they took an apprentice, and this was more money than my parents could raise for the purpose. But that was not the whole difficulty. To become a printer's apprentice, I must be bound to serve seven years of what I deemed little better than slavery. The boys of my age had hosts of traditions of bad masters, cruel treatment, and of runaway apprentices being caught and lodged in jail; so I had no little dread of selling my liberty for seven years to any master, and especially to one of whom I knew nothing.

The absurd rule of requiring a boy of fourteen to serve seven years before he can be employed in a trade as a workman, is a relic of the dark ages, which the Americans have wisely thrown aside. A boy in American will work on his father's farm till he is eighteen, and learn thoroughly everything connected with farming, and then, if need be, go and learn a trade three years; and at twenty-one he is as well skilled in his trade as if he had served a seven years' apprenticeship in England.

On full consideration, I concluded to try shoe-making with my father, where there would be no legal bondage to endure, and where I saw the years of my servitude might be shortened.

After the lapse of full half a century, the desire of my heart to become a printer was gratified, and after I was sixty years of age I acquired the art of printing. Many will suppose that my attainments are superficial, but there are abundant witnesses to testify to the contrary. With no workmen but Karens who have learned to print at my hands, without any binding or apprenticeship system, we now do printing equal to work done in the best printing offices in India. We print in English, Burmese, Karen, Old Pali, and Sanscrit.

The fact of my being able to acquire a new trade in old age, has been dwelt upon because it contains a valuable lesson to working-men. In England especially, when a man has acquired a trade, he usually considers himself bound to that trade through life, much as a Hindu is bound to his caste, but this is a great mistake. When a young man has learned a trade, he should feel that, if expedient, he can learn any other.

In the changes produced in the present age by the introduction of new machinery, whole departments of hand-labor are sometimes superseded, and it is of the first importance that the men thrown out of work should be able to turn their hands to something else. If a man has the command of two trades, should he follow one generally, he may find it profitable at particular seasons to work at the other.

When I was in Cincinnati, there was a Yankee in the shop who had a patch of broom-corn in the suburbs that he visited occasionally; and when the corn was ripe, he gave up his shoe-making, reaped his corn, and went to making brooms, from which he realized a handsome sum of money.