Читать книгу A Traveler From Altruria - William Dean Howells - Страница 7

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 pressed 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.’”

“And they’re much better off in your hands than they were in the union,” said the professor.

“I don’t know about that,” said the manufacturer, “but I’m sure I am.”

We laughed with him, all but the minister, whose mind seemed to have caught upon some other point, and who sat absently by.

“And is it your opinion, from what you know of the working-man generally, that they all have this twist in their heads?” the professor asked.

“They have, until they begin to rise. Then they get rid of it mighty soon. Let a man save something—enough to get a house of his own, and take a boarder or two, and perhaps have a little money at interest—and he sees the matter in another light.”

“Do you think he sees it more clearly?” asked the minister.

“He sees it differently.”

“What do you think?” the minister pursued, turning to the lawyer. “You are used to dealing with questions of justice—”

“Rather more with questions of law, I’m afraid,” the other returned, pleasantly, putting his feet together before him and looking down at them in a way he had. “But, still, I have a great interest in questions of justice, and I confess that I find a certain wild equity in this principle, which I see nobody could do business on. It strikes me as idyllic—it’s a touch of real poetry in the rough-and-tumble prose of our economic life.”

He referred this to me as something I might appreciate in my quality of literary man, and I responded in my quality of practical man: “There’s certainly more rhyme than reason in it.”

He turned again to the minister:

“I suppose the ideal of the Christian state is the family?”

“I hope so,” said the minister, with the gratitude that I have seen people of his cloth show when men of the world conceded premises which the world usually contests; it has seemed to me pathetic.

“And if that is the case, why, the logic of the postulate is that the prosperity of the weakest is the sacred charge and highest happiness of all the stronger. But the law has not recognized any such principle, in economics at least, and if the labor unions are based upon it they are outlaw, so far as any hope of enforcing it is concerned; and it is bad for men to feel themselves outlaw. How is it,” the lawyer continued, turning to the Altrurian, “in your country? We can see no issue here, if the first principle of organized labor antagonizes the first principle of business.”

“But I don’t understand precisely yet what the first principle of business is,” returned my guest.

“Ah, that raises another interesting question,” said the lawyer. “Of course, every business man solves the problem practically according to his temperament and education, and I suppose that on first thoughts every business man would answer you accordingly. But perhaps the personal equation is something you wish to eliminate from the definition.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Still, I would rather not venture upon it first,” said the lawyer. “Professor, what should you say was the first principle of business?”

“Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest,” the professor promptly answered.