II
The toil of the laborer is thoughtless. There is in it neither conception nor initiative nor the development of that which is new. Though the hands labor and the body bend, the heart is not in it. It is all a weariness and a travail of the flesh, and the profit is unseen.
In a certain factory, not far from the heart of the city of New York, I worked as a laborer. My duty was to carry shavings and lumber and to sweep the floor. All day, from the blowing of the whistle at seven in the morning to its welcome blast at six at night, my body was busy bending and lifting in the effort to keep the floor clean of shavings and supplying a half-dozen machines with lumber. The slow, unchanging, imperative nature of the work, the fact that I went on whether one man came or another one stayed away, the dreary persistence with which it was necessary to repeat the same motion day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, was, to the thinking and restless mind, maddening.
In this factory at the time there ruled a foreman well fitted to the scheme of things. He was a strange, egotistic, vainglorious soul, with a mind so set up by the fact that he had been foreman of this little shop that there was no living with him. He was arbitrary; his word was law. With an air that might have become a tragedian, he walked about his domain and glared upon each and all, meditating upon his exalted position. Every word was either a command or a reproof, and in times of excitement or depression, such as naturally flow from the hurry or the lack of work, he was always about, venting his humor or wrath, as his mood dictated.
This situation, coupled with the meager wages, the enormous wealth of the corporation which controlled it all, the utter indifference of those who sat at the top to those who worked at the bottom, was a difficult thing to endure. It was so very apparent to any one who thought that the work of those at the bottom was entirely without point save as a means of subsistence. To lift and carry, to move along given lines and within certain limits—this was the sum and substance of wisdom required, and it mattered little who did it. Some small personal characteristics figured in, such as whether a man was naturally quick or slow, good-humored or ill-humored and the like, but the main point was to do the work as conceived, planned, initiated and developed by some one above. And this could be acquired until it was not a matter of thought but of rote. What you thought or how you felt was not involved.
One of its pathetic aspects was that it was involved with the maintenance of a condition which was not necessarily beneficial or worthy of approval. So many of the owners, for whom these thousands upon thousands of individuals labored, were mere idlers in society, social loafers, daily bulletined as the chief factors in a dozen trivial amusements, and as wholly unconscious of this under-condition which made for their situation and pleasure as if it did not exist at all. For every motion and bending here, some one else was deriving the privilege not to move or bend there. It was as if some untoward power were momentarily taking something from each of these and giving it to some one who did not even know whence it came.
And the saddest part of it was that these toilers, born for the most part to a condition and with brains unsuited to anything much better, were still not so dull that they could not see, and that rather plainly, how scurvily Nature was using them, with what a vast, contemptuous indifference. It was little to Her whether they lived or died, did poorly or well. Most of them were mere machines who had acquired the little they knew by observing others, who, if they were capable of thinking at all, were restricted by the nature of their labor in utilizing thought, and yet they could see so plainly that those above them did very little or nothing, and received much, so much more. It was one of those situations in which labor, a mere round of motions, took the place of thought and left them weary and disinterested at the close of the day, not fit to originate a thought if it had been possible or necessary.
And yet, after a time, it occurred to me that it was not, perhaps, so much the thoughtlessness of it that was so wretched as that any human being, toiling to his full capacity, should not receive more of the legitimate profits of his labor. These men, ignorant and, in a way, valueless without direction, were nevertheless useful creatures and, in this sense if no other, were deserving of a far more reasonable share of the profit which their efforts created. That it should not be so, that despite their willing or non-willing they should be driven early and late to create a surplus which was not directly applied to the pressing needs of society as a whole, but to the frittering amusements of the few, not much better in the main than themselves, seemed hard.
And yet sometimes when I looked out upon the world as it glimmered before my windows—when I saw, as it so chanced, the waters of the river flowing by, the splendid boats riding at anchor or steaming peacefully past, and the wonder of the hills and hollows, all set suggestively before the eyes—it came to me that, perhaps, in spite of the seeming injustice involved in this situation, variety was as essential to happiness as so-called justice or equation, and that the very inequalities I was bemoaning were the things which I was admiring in Nature. To blot out the light and the shadows, to remove the hills and dales, to take away the far reaches which spread between luxury and want, idleness and toil—might not these be the things which after all would rob life of much of its value and charm? Might they not?
But as I turned again to the weariness of my labor and saw once more the routine, the comparative slavery, the drag of almost endless hours, I could not help wishing for each that there might be some better solution than this necessity for variety—that perhaps the heights and hollows need not after all be so vast. To survey a mountain, to view a desert—was not this the privilege of but a few? And might not the true beauty of life exist in the way-places where are neither heights nor depths but only a tender and appealing undulation? I wondered, and still do, for in spite of endless personal inconvenience I have never been able to believe that an unbreakable dead level of equality should maintain, that none should suffer overmuch, that none should want to the extreme. And yet at this time, in this place, the less varied seemed the all-to-be-desired. That it was not to be found in so starkly diversified a world as here offers did not lessen the pain of the labor or the value of the ideal in the least. To work, to wait, to hope, to pray for some such change—how important these loomed in the hour of weariness! And yet the charm that hope cast over effort was as though the difference had already in part been bridged and that the realization of the ideal was almost at hand.