Causes of Discontent | Page 8

gains, he is guilty of an act as worthy of
indictment as the strike. I do not see why a conspiracy against labor is
not as illegal as a conspiracy against capital. The truth is, the
possession of power by men or associations makes them selfish and
generally cruel. Few employers consider anything but the arithmetic of
supply and demand in fixing wages, and workingmen who have the
power, tend to act as selfishly as the male printers used to act in
striking in an establishment which dared to give employment to women
typesetters. It is of course sentimental to say it, but I do not expect we
shall ever get on with less friction than we have now, until men
recognize their duties as well as their rights in their relations with each
other.
In running over some of the reasons for the present discontent, and the
often illogical expression of it, I am far from saying anything against
legitimate associations for securing justice and fair play. Disassociated
labor has generally been powerless against accumulated capital. Of
course, organized labor, getting power will use its power (as power is
always used) unjustly and tyrannically. It will make mistakes, it will
often injure itself while inflicting general damage. But with all its
injustice, with all its surrender of personal liberty, it seeks to call the
attention of the world to certain hideous wrongs, to which the world is
likely to continue selfishly indifferent unless rudely shaken out of its
sense of security. Some of the objects proposed by these associations
are chimerical, but the agitation will doubtless go on until another
element is introduced into work and wages than mere supply and
demand. I believe that some time it will be impossible that a woman
shall be forced to make shirts at six cents apiece, with the gaunt figures
of starvation or a life of shame waiting at the door. I talked recently
with the driver of a street-car in a large city. He received a dollar and
sixty cents a day. He went on to his platform at eight in the morning,
and left it at twelve at night, sixteen hours of continuous labor every
day in the week. He had no rest for meals, only snatched what he could
eat as he drove along, or at intervals of five or eight minutes at the end

of routes. He had no Sunday, no holiday in the year.
Between twelve o'clock at night and eight the next morning he must
wash and clean his car. Thus his hours of sleep were abridged. He was
obliged to keep an eye on the passengers to see that they put their fares
in the box, to be always, responsible for them, that they got on and off
without accident, to watch that the rules were enforced, and that
collisions and common street dangers were avoided. This mental and
physical strain for sixteen consecutive hours, with scant sleep, so
demoralized him that he was obliged once in two or three months to
hire a substitute and go away to sleep. This is treating a human being
with less consideration than the horses receive. He is powerless against
the great corporation; if he complains, his place is instantly filled; the
public does not care.
Now what I want to say about this case, and that of the woman who
makes a shirt for six cents (and these are only types of disregard of
human souls and bodies that we are all familiar with), is that if society
remains indifferent it must expect that organizations will attempt to
right them, and the like wrongs, by ways violent and destructive of the
innocent and guilty alike. It is human nature, it is the lesson of history,
that real wrongs, unredressed, grow into preposterous demands. Men
are much like nature in action; a little disturbance of atmospheric
equilibrium becomes a cyclone, a slight break in the levee 'a crevasse
with immense destructive power.
In considering the growth of discontent, and of a natural disregard of
duties between employers and employed, it is to be noted that while
wages in nearly all trades are high, the service rendered deteriorates,
less conscience is put into the work, less care to give a fair day's work
for a fair day's wages, and that pride in good work is vanishing. This
may be in the nature of retaliation for the indifference to humanity
taught by a certain school of political economists, but it is, nevertheless,
one of the most alarming features of these times. How to cultivate the
sympathy of the employers with the employed as men, and how to
interest the employed in their work beyond the mere wages they receive,
is the double problem.
As the intention of this paper was