ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL: MY BREAKFAST PARTY
ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL: MY BREAKFAST PARTY.
At a little place called Clarkville I had a breakfast party. Perhaps I had better begin at the beginning. It had been a hard frosty night, and I slept in a barn on two planks beside an old rusty reaping-machine. At five in the morning I made my first fire of the day, and I shared a pot of hot tea with a disreputable tramp, who had come to warm himself at the blaze. By seven o'clock I had walked into the next village, about five miles on, and I was ready for a second breakfast. My first had been for the purpose of getting warm; now I was hungry for something to eat.
It was a beautiful morning; on each side of the road were orchards in full bloom, the gnarled and angular apple trees were showing themselves lovely in myriad outbreaking of blossom, and there were thousands of dandelions in the rank green grass beneath them. The sides of the roadway and the banks of the village stream were deep in grass and clover, and every hollow of the world seemed brimming with sunshine. The sun had been radiant, and he stood over a shoulder of the Catskills and poured warmth on the whole Western world.
On the bank of the stream I spread out my things, emptying out of my pack, pots, cups, provisions, books, paper, pen, and ink. I gathered wisps of last year's weeds, and on a convenient spot started my little fire. I had just put eggs in to boil when the first of my party arrived. This was little Charles van Wie and hisfriend. Charles was hired to come early to the school-house and light the fire, so that the school would be warm by the time the teacher and the other boys and girls arrived. I did not know that I had pitched my camp just between the village and the school, on the way all the children would have to come. In America the school-house is always some distance from the village—this is so that mothers may not come running in and out every minute, and it is a good arrangement for other reasons. It gives every little boy and girl a walk, and the chance of having upon occasion extraordinary adventures.
Charles and his friend set to work to gather sticks for me, and saved me the trouble of rushing every now and then for fuel to keep up the fire. Then they hurried away to the school-house, but promised, excitedly, to come back as soon as they could.
Charles returned and asked me where I was going to, and what was my name and where I'd come from. I told him, and he took out a pocket-book and pencil and wrote all down.
Then other boys came and watched me make my coffee. The boys—they were all under twelve—had bunches of white lilac fixed in their coats. I sat and ate my food and chattered.
"Is the lilac for your teacher?" I asked of a boy.
"I guessnot," he replied.
There was a look of disgust on his face.
"Is your teacher strict?"
"Some."
The boys all sat or sprawled on the grass and chaffed one another.
One of them was wearing a badge in his buttonhole, a white enamelled button, on which was printed very distinctly:
EveryD A MBooster.
But the DAM, when you looked at it closely, turned out to be "Dayton's Adding Machines."
"What does 'booster' mean?" I asked.
"A feller that makes a job go," it was explained to me.
After breakfast I took a photograph of them sitting in the grass. They were much pleased.
"If Skinny Atlas had been here he'd have broke the camera," said one of them.
An extremely fat boy came into view and approached our party. The others all cried at him "Skinny Atlas," so I asked:
"Is that a nickname? Is his surname Atlas?"
"No," they replied, "his surname is Higgins. But he's so darned fat that we call him Skinny Atlas. We have a saying, 'Put a nickel in the slot and up comes Skinny Atlas.'"
Accordingly all the boys cried out, "Put a nickel in the slot and up comes Skinny Atlas."
The fat boy, wearing a big straw sun-bonnet, came up and walloped several little boys. There was some horseplay round the embers of my fire, but Charles van Wie set an example by giving warning—
"Next person who pushes me I baste."
But it was getting late, and three little girls who had been hovering shyly at a distance cried out that it was time for the boys to go in.
The school had only fifteen pupils, boys and girls together, and they were all in one class, and they learned "the three R's," physiology, and the geography of the county they lived in.
The making of an American citizen is a simple matter in the country. And little Charles van Wie would make one of the best that are turned out, I should think.
Later on in the morning I went along to the school-house and peeped in at the window. There they all were, under the stern sway of a little school-mistress. But they didn't see me.
How useful to the tramp is the custom of hanging in the school-room a map of the county or of the state in which the children live. Often when I have wanted to know where I was I have clambered to the school-house window and consulted the map on the wall.
Once more to the road. The American high-road differs considerably from any way in Europe. Every farm-house has a white letter-box on a post outsideits main entrance, and the farmer posts his letter and hoists a metal flag as a signal to the peripatetic postman that there are letters to collect. There are no thatched cottages; the homesteads stand back from the road, they are always of wood, and have shady verandahs and cosily furnished front rooms. The fields on each side of the road are protected by six-inch mesh steel netting, turned out by some great factory in Pittsburg I suppose. There are very few country guide-posts, and in New York State those there are come rather as a reward to you after you have guessed right. They are put up at a distance from the cross-roads. The pointers of the guide-posts are of tin. The telephone cones are of green glass, the poles are mostly chestnut, are not straight, and rot quickly. There are many advertisements by the way, and as you approach a town of importance they are as thick as fungi. They are not written for tramps to jeer at, but as hints to rich motorists. Still one necessarily smiles at:
CLOTHE YOUR WHOLE FAMILY ON CREDIT$1 A WEEK.
or
DUTCHESS TROUSERS. TEN CENTS A BUTTON.A DOLLAR A RIP.
A great portion of the State of Indiana seems to be devoted to Dutchess trousers, and I often wonderwhether the company had to pay many indemnities to customers.
One sorry feature of country advertising was the number of notices scrawled in black with charcoal or painted in tar. In Europe picnickers write their names or the names of their sweethearts on the rocks and the walls and palings, but in America they write their trade, the thing they sell, and the price a pound, what O. Henry would call their especial sort of "graft."
Then "rrrrrrr! rhrhrh—whaup—ssh!" the automobile appears on the horizon, passes you, and is gone. I have no prejudice against automobilists; they were very hospitable to me, and carried me many miles. If I had accepted all the lifts offered me I should have been in Chicago in a week, instead of taking two months on the journey. But the farmers curse them. On one Sunday late in June I counted everything that passed me. The farmer commonly tells you that hundreds of automobiles whirl past his door every day. This day there were just one hundred and ten, of which thirty-two were auto-cycles and the rest cars. As a set-off against this there were only five buggies and three ordinary cyclists. That was one of the last days of June, when I was seventy miles from Chicago. I had two offers to take me into the city that day!
Besides counting the vehicles that passed me I took stock of the automobilists themselves. No onepassed till 7A.M., and then came a loving couple, looking like a runaway match. He was clasping her waist, and their trunks were roped on to the car behind. Then six young men, all in their wind-blown shirts, came tearing along on auto-cycles. Scarcely had the noise of these subsided when a smart picnic party rolled past in a smooth-running car, flying purple flags on which was printed the name of their home city—Michigan. This is a common custom in America, to carry a flag with the name of your city. It boosts your own town, and is thought to bring trade there.
Six townsmen came past me in a grand car. Their hats were all off; they were all clean shaven and bald. Coats had been left at home, and the six were in radiantly clean coloured shirts. They smiled at me; I was one of the sights of the road.
Many picnic parties passed me, and men and women called out to me facetiously. Six shop-girls on a joy ride came past, and one of them kissed her hand to me—that is one of the things the girl in the car can safely do when she is passing a pedestrian.
Family parties went by, and also placid husbands and wives having a spin before lunch, and bashful happy pairs sitting behind the back of the discreet chauffeurs. There came an auto-cycle with a frantic man in front and a girl astride on his carrier behind. She was wiping the sand out of her eyes as she passed,her skirt was blown by the wind, and she showed a pair of dainty legs; the funny way in which she was obliged to sit made her look like a stalk bending over among reeds.
One of the few cyclists I met came up after this, and he dismounted to talk to me. He was a tender of gasoline engines "on vacation." I learned from him about the single auto-cycle for two. It appears that in America they manufacture special seats to screw on the back of a motor-cycle; some use that. Many, however, just strap a cushion on. Young men who have auto-cycles have a "pull" with the girls; they pick them up and take them to business, or take them home from business, and on holidays they take them for rides of joy. Several similar couples passed me during the day.
All sorts of gear went by; rich gentlemen in stately pride, workmen with their week-day grime scarcely cleared from their faces, gay girls with parasols, honeymoon pairs, cars with men driving, cars with women at the wheel. The automobile is far more of a general utility in the United States than in England. Workmen, and, indeed, farmers themselves—not those who curse—have their own cars. They mortgage their property to get them, but they get them all the same. Even women buy cars for themselves, and are to be seen driving them themselves. In Great Britain it is very rare that you see a woman travelling alonein a car, but in America it is a frequent sight. Of course in Russia, in the country, an automobile is still a rarity. I passed last summer in a populous part of the Urals and did not see a single car. I did not even see an ordinary bicycle. The farther west you go the more you find the inventions of the day taken advantage of. It is an important phenomenon in America; it shows that there is a readiness to adopt and utilise any new thing right off, directly it is discovered.
This readiness, however, results in a lack of seriousness. Inexpert driving is no crime; accidents are nothing to weep over; badly constructed cars are driven along loose springy roads with blood-curdling speed and recklessness. The pedestrian is vexed to see a car come towards him, leaping, bounding, dodging, dribbling, like some tricky centre-forward in a game of football. The nervous pedestrian has to climb trees or walls upon occasion to be sure he won't be killed. And then the cars themselves go frequently into ditches, or overturn and take fire. The car has become a toy, but it's dangerous for the children to play with.
Then the dust! Carlyle said there was nothing but Justice in this world, and he used the law of gravity as his metaphor, but he didn't consider the wind—alas, that the dust does not fly in front of the car and get into the motorist's eyes, but only drifts away over the poor tramp who never did him any harm.
The only horse vehicle I remarked on the road was the buggy, a gig with disproportionately large wheels, the direct descendant of the home-made cart. The buggy is still popular.
"Where've you been?" asks one American of another.
"Oh, just buggying around," he replies.
But the buggy is staid and conventional. It belongs to the old censorious religious America. It is supremely the vehicle of the consciously virtuous. It is also a specially rural vehicle. I think those who ride in buggies despise motorists from the bottom of their hearts; they think them vulgar townspeople, and consider motoring a form of trespass. But the automobilists are not prevented, and they bear no rancour. They haven't time to consider the countryman. The man in the buggy belongs to the past. In the future there will not be time to be condemnatory, and the man who stands still to feel self-virtuous will go to the wall.
The people who will continue to feel superior to the motorists will be tramps sitting on palings, grinning at them as they pass by. They also will remain the only people the motorists, rushing abreast of Time, will ever envy. However much progress progresses there will always remain those who sit on the palings and grin.
As I tramped from village to village I was surprised to see so much stained glass in the churches of the Methodists, the Congregationalists, and other Puritans. Until quite modern times stained glass belonged exclusively to the ritualistic denominations. The Puritan, believing in simplicity of service, and in spirit rather than in form, put stained glass in the same category as the burning of incense, singing in a minor key, and praying in Latin. It partook of the glamour of idolatry; it had a sensuous appeal; it blurred the pure light of understanding. The true Puritan meeting-place is one of clear glass windows, hard seats, and a big Bible. It seems a pity that a very clear profession of faith should be blurred by picture windows—and, let me add by way of parenthesis, cushioned seats and revivalist preachers.
I examined in detail the coloured glass of a fine "Reform Church" that I passed on the road. The windows were rather impressive. They were not representations of scenes in Holy Writ, they contained no pictures of saints or angels, of the Saviour, or of the Virgin. So they escaped the imputation of idolatry.They were just pictures of symbolical objects or of significant letters. Thus, one window was the bird and symbolised Freedom, another was an anchor and symbolised Hope, another was a crown and symbolised Eternal Life. In one window the letters C.E. were illuminated—meaning Christian Endeavour, I presume; on another window was the open Bible, symbolising the foundation of belief. In every case the whole window was stained, and the little symbolical picture was set against a brilliant background.
It was all in good taste, and was a pleasant ornament, which made the church look very attractive exteriorly. But it was a compromise with a spirit not its own. My explanation is, some one must have wanted chapels to put in stained glass. Some one now has a great interest in making them put in stained glass. He is the manufacturer of that commodity. He has put stained glass on the market in such a way that every church is bound to have it. And he has devised a way of not offending the rigorous Puritans. "What is wrong in coloured light?" said he. "Nothing. It is only what you use it for. We can use it to show the things in which we believe." If incense could be manufactured in such a way as to make millions of dollars it would find its way somehow into the chapels. I was walking one day with an itinerant preacher, a man who called himself "a creed smasher." He wanted to weld all creeds into one and unify the Churchof Christ. "Think of commerce," said he, "already it has stopped the wars of the nations; in time it will calm the wars of the sects. If only the churches were corporations, and Methodists could hold shares in Roman Catholicism, and Roman Catholics in Methodism!"
Commerce is exerting an influence that cannot be withstood. To take another instance, it has provided America with rocking-chairs and porch-swings. Although the Americans are an extremely active people, much more so than the British, yet their houses are all full of rocking-chairs, and on their verandahs they have porch-swings and hammocks. The British have straight-backs.
The Americans did not all cry out with one voice for rocking-chairs and swings. The Pilgrim Fathers did not bring them over. The reason they have them lies in the fact that some manufacturer started making them for the few. Then ambition took possession of him and he said, "There's something in rocking-chairs. I'm going to turn them out on a large scale."
"But there aren't the customers to buy them," some one objected.
"Never mind, we'll make the customers. We'll put them to the people in such a way that they gotta buy. We'll make 'em feel there's going to be such an opportunity for buyin' 'em as never was and never will be again."
"You believe you'll succeed?"
"We'll make it so universal that if a man goes into a house and doesn't see a rocking-chair and a porch-swing he'll think, 'My Lord, they've had the brokers in!'"
So rocking-chairs and porch-swings came. So, many things have come to humanity—many worse things.
I had just written this note, for I have written most of my book by the road, when I heard the following interesting talk about the town of Benton, Pennsylvania. I was walking from Wilkes Barre to Williamsport, and Benton is on the way. It is a place that has had many fires lately.
"Ah reckon ah know wot cleared Benton out more'n fires."
"What's that?"
"Wy, otomobeeles; mortgaging their farms to get 'em. There's not much in Benton. You couldn't raise a hundred dollars. It's the agents and the boosters of the companies that are mos' to blame, no doubt, but they're fools all the same who buy otomobeeles when they cahn pay their bills at the stores."
"What agents?" I asked. "D'you mean commercial travellers?"
"No. The agents in the town. Every little town has a man, sometimes two or three men, who are agents for the companies who manufacture the cars; they are just like the insurance agents, and are always talkingabout their business, comparing makes of car, praising this one and that, and getting folks on to want them."
"I suppose the companies want to make the motor car a domestic necessity, a thing no one can do without," I remarked.
"You're right; they do and they will. They'll fix that in time, you betcher, we'll all be having them. Then when we cahn do without 'em they'll raise the prices on us. Already they've started it with the gasoline; there's plenty motor spirit in the world, but the company gets possession of it and regulates the prices. An' you cahn make an oto go without gasoline. They can put it on us every time."
I should say society at Benton was suffering very badly from the influence of depraved commercialism. Some years ago Miss Ida Tarbell exposed what has been called "The Arson Trust," a company formed for setting fire to insured establishments on a basis of 10 per cent profit on the spoil. Benton might have furnished her with some interesting examples. There have been so many fires in the little town of late that tramps are refused the shelter even of barns, as if their match-ends were responsible. On the Fourth of July three years ago half the town was burnt down. Last year in a gale the shirt factory was gutted; the workmen had banked the fire up for the night, and about twenty minutes after the last man had left the works there was an explosion, and the redcoals were scattered over the wooden building. Two months ago a large house took fire, and just a week before I reached the settlement the large Presbyterian church was consumed. Indeed, as I came into the town I remarked with some surprise the charred walls and beams of the church, and read the pathetic printing on the stone of foundation, "This stone was laid in 1903."
I had an interesting account of the church from the wife of a farmer at whose house I stayed a night. The church had been insured for seventeen thousand dollars, and it was twelve thousand dollars in debt. The money borrowed was not secured on the church building, but on the personal estates of many people in the town. Consequently, several people were liable to be sold up if the money were not forthcoming. Two days before settling day the fire took place, and there was doubtless rejoicing in some hearts. The villagers had tried hard to make the place pay, they had even let a portion of the church building to be used as a bank! Bazaars had failed. The debt-raiser had tried "to put a revival over on to them," but had failed. The minister, not receiving his salary, had abandoned them, and at last the bare fact remained of the big white church and the big unpaid debt. Then occurred the providential fire.
But the insurance company would not pay the seventeen thousand dollars. The fire had taken placeunder suspicious circumstances, and it was said there would be a legal fight over it. The conflagration had occurred on the night of a school-opening meeting. Choice flowers had been sent from many houses in the town, and it was beautifully decorated. There was, however, nothing obviously inflammable in the church; it was built largely of brick and stone. But about an hour after the people had gone home the fire broke out. Next day it was found that the big Bible had been soaked in coal oil. Oiled newspaper was found, and it was alleged that the fire brigade would have saved the church, but that as fast as they put it out in front somebody else was lighting it up behind. Anyhow, the insurance company refused to pay the seventeen thousand dollars. But it cannot refuse absolutely; the advertisement of failure to pay would be too damaging—it will put up a new church instead! The Presbyterian church will be resurrected.
"I put Benton up against the world for fires," said my hostess. "For a small place, only a thousand people, I reckon there isn't its like."
For my part I felt sorry for the Bentonians, even for those who set the fire alight, supposing it was deliberately lighted. When commercial interest is the greatest thing in the world there are opportunities for a few men to feel themselves great and powerful, but that glory of mankind is far overbalanced by the occasions on which it causes man to be mean.Commercial tricks bring the holy spirit of man into disrepute. To find oneself mixed up in certain machinations is poignantly humiliating. We have all of us been wounded in that way ere now. The just pride of the soul has been offended, and we have thought how shameful a thing it was to have become mixed up in it at all, byitmeaning the world, the whole shady business, call it what you will.
As I went along from village to village in New York and Pennsylvania I was struck by the uniformity of the architecture. Every church and school and store and farmstead seemed standard size and "as supplied." There seemed to be a passion for having known units. Not only in architecture was this evident, but in every utensil, machine, carriage, dress of the people. It was evident in the people themselves. Americans have the name of being extremely conventional. I think that is because, under the present domination of thecommercial machine, American boys and girls and men and women are all turned into standard sizes. If Americans have rigid principles of ethics it is because they believe all the parts of the great machine are standardised, and that when any one part wears out there must always be an accurately fitting other part ready to be fixed where the old one has fallen out. Personality itself is standardised; thus the tailor-priest advertises his wear, "Preserve your Personality in Clothes. Occasionally you have observed somearticle of wear that has led you to the mental conclusion—'That's my style—that's me.'"
THE TRAMP'S DRESSING-ROOM
THE TRAMP'S DRESSING-ROOM.
It was strange to me to find that even tramps and outcasts, who fulfil little function in the machine, were expected to conform to type. I was stared at, questioned; my rough tweeds, so suitable to me, were an object of mirth; my action of washing my face and my teeth by the side of the road was a portentous aberration. I remember how astonished a motorist and his wife appeared when they came upon me in the act of drawing a pail of water for a thirsty calf one morning in Indiana. The temperature stood at ninety-five in the shade—all nature was parched, and as I came along the highway a calf, fastened by a chain to the steel netting of a field, came up and rubbed his nose on my knees. As calves don't usually take the initiative in this way, I concluded he expected me to do something for him. There was an empty pail beside him. I took it to the farmhouse pump and drew water. As I did so, the farmer and his wife drew up at the farm in their motor, and they looked at me curiously. The calf came bounding towards me and almost upset the pail in his eagerness to drink. Then he gulped down all the water, and whilst I went to draw another pailful he executed a sort of war-dance or joy-dance, throwing out his hind legs and bounding about in a way that testified his happiness. The farmer's wife broke silence:
"Wha' yer doing?"
"I'm giving the calf some water."
"Nao," said she, and looked at her husband, "giving the calf some water, can—you—beat—that?"
I gave the calf his second bucketful and then started off down the way again, and the farmer and his wife looked after me in blank surprise. In America no tramp has any compassion for thirsty calves, he is not expected to look after the thirst of any one but himself. The farmer and his wife looked at one another, and their eyes seemed to say, "But tramps don't do these things!"
Thence it may be surmised that America is no place for individuals as such. Originality is a sin. Americans hate to give an individual special attention, special notice. Even personal salvation is merged in mass salvation. The revivalist, his press agents, and stewards are a means of wholesale salvation. A revival meeting is a machine for saving souls on a large scale. It might be thought that the revivalist himself took his stand as an exceptional individual. Not at all: he is only a type. American public opinion does not allow a man to stand out as superior. It is surprising the dearth of noble men in the popular estimate of to-day. Mockery follows on the heels of noble action or individual action, and reduces it to type. That is a great function of the American Press of to-day, the defaming of men of originality and theexplaining away of noble action. I remember a conversation I heard at Cleveland. Roosevelt had just cleared himself of the press libel of drunkenness.
"Wasn't it a good thing to clear the air, so," said one man, "and get clear of the charge once for all?"
"I don't think he got clear of it," said the other. "It's all very well to bring an action against the editor of a provincial paper, but why didn't he take up the cudgels against one of the powerful New York journals, who said the same thing? They had money and could have defended their case."
"I don't think money was needed—except to buy evidence."
"If you ask me," said the other, "it was all a very shrewd electioneering dodge. Roosevelt is an expert politician. He knows the value of being in the limelight, and he knows that nothing will fetch more votes in the United States just now than a reputation for sobriety. He was just boosting himself and the home products."
That is a fair example of the way people think of striking personalities and original views.
Then every man is considered a booster. Boosting is accepted as a national and individual function. Towns are placarded: "Boost for your own city and its own industries. Make a habit of it." In Oil City, for instance, I found in every shop a ticket announcing "Booster Week June 9-16." In that weekOil City was going to do all it could to call attention to itself. Citizens would pledge themselves to speak of Oil City to strangers in the train and when on visits to other towns. The city of Newark, New Jersey, is always recommending its own people and visitors to "Think of Newark." Whenever you enter into conversation with an American you find him suddenly drifting towards telling you the name of a hotel to stay at, or of an establishment where they sell "dandy cream," or he is praising the bricks turned out by the local brick works, or the conditions of the employment of labour in some silk works on which his native town is dependent for prosperity. In a widely distributed "Creed of the American" I read, "I remember always that I am a booster." Even fathers refer to their new-born babies as "little boosters." It should be remembered when Americans are boasting of their native land and its institutions that they were cradled in boosting. It is a habit that in many ways has profited America. It has attracted the emigrant more than all that has ever been printed about it. It is a great commercial habit. But it is in the end degrading.
What is the name of the fairy who has muttered an incantation over the Pilgrim Father and changed him into a booster? And is a booster only a Pilgrim Father who brags about the stuff he manufactures?
It seemed to me that by substituting the ideaboosterfor the ideamanyou get rid of so many of theweaknesses of flesh and blood. A man who is boosting day in and day out, using his tongue as a sort of living stores' catalogue, is necessarily loyal to the great machine. But loyalty to the machine has its dangers. On my journey to Chicago I made some interesting observations in Natural History. I got into the train at Franklin to go to Oil City, some five or six urban miles. What was my astonishment to see that each of the eight or nine passengers in my car had fixed their railway tickets in the ribbons of their hats, and they themselves were deep in their newspapers. The conductor came along and took the tickets from their hats and examined them, collected those that were due to be given up and punched those that were not, and stuck them back in the ribbons of the hats, the wearers reading their newspapers all the time and making not the slightest sign that they noticed what the conductor was doing. The only sign of consciousness I observed was a sort of subtle pleasure in acting so—the sort of mild pleasure which suffuses the faces of lunatics when they are humoured by visitors to the asylum. They were shamming that they were machinery, and in almost the same style as the man who is under the delusion that he is a teapot, one arm being his spout and the other his handle.
Thus the elevator man in the Department Store also thinks himself a bit of machinery. He seems to be trained to act mechanically, and never to alter thestaccato patter that comes from his mouth at each floor. He speaks like a human phonograph.
Then all waiters, shop-attendants, barbers, and the like try to behave like manikins. Most of all, in the language of Americans is the mechanical obsession apparent. A man who is confined in a hospital writes: "I'mholding down a bedin the hospital over here." The man who meets another and brings him along, simply "collects" him in America. The baseball team that beats another 6-0 "slips a six-nothing defeat" on them. Especially in baseball reports, commercialism and rhythms heard in great "works" abound.
The influence of great machinery gets to the heart of the people. A man when he joins a gang of workmen is taught to co-operate; he has to trim off any original or personal way of doing things, and fit in with the rest of the gang. When the gang is going mechanically and easily, a man quicker than the rest is taken as leader, and the speed of the work is raised. The mechanical action in each individual is intensified, is perfected. Cinematograph films are even taken of gangs at work; the pictures are shown before experts, who indicate weak points, recommend discharges or alterations and show how the gangs can be reconstituted to work more smoothly. Each man is drilled to act like a machine, and the drilling enters into the fibre of his being to such an extent that when work is over his muscles move habitually in certain directions,and the rhythm of his day's labour controls his language and his thought.
In the factory it is the same. In a vast mechanical contrivance there is just one thing that machinery cannot do; so between two immense complicated engines it is necessary to place a human link. A man goes there, and flesh and blood is grafted into steel and oil. The man performs his function all day, but he also senses the great machine in his mind and his soul; and when he goes out to vote for his President, or talk to men and women about the world in which he lives, he does so more as a standardised bit of mechanism, than as a tender human being.
Alas, for the men and women who wear out and cease to be serviceable! They are the old iron, and their place is the scrap-heap. "White trash" is the name by which they go.
Bernard Shaw, and indeed many others, look forward to the diminution of toil by machinery. The minimising of toil is to them a great blessing. Because machinery lessens toil they are on the side of machinery. Meanwhile life shows a paradox. The Russian peasant who works without machines toils less than the American who takes advantage of every invention. The Russian emigrant who comes to America simply does not know what work is, and he stares in amazement at the angry foreman who tells him, when he is at it at his hardest, to "get a move on yer."
In America the Americans slave; they slave for dollars, for more business, for advancement, but in the end for dollars only, I suppose. They will fill up any odd moment with some work that will bring in money. They will make others work, and take the last ounce of energy out of their employees. The machine itself is the size of America, and only in little nooks and corners can anything spring up that is not of the machine. Even millionaires know nothing more to do than to go on making millions. Yet there is not a feverish anxiety to get money. Losses are borne with equanimity. It's just a matter of "the apple tree's loaded with fruit. I'm going up to get another apple."
Present experience shows that machinery increases the toil of mankind. It need not increase it, but it does. It might diminish it, but there are many reasons why it does not. For one thing, it increases the standard of living. It makes rocking-chairs, porch-swings, automobiles, and the like indispensable things. First, machinery makes the things, then the things make the machinery duplicate themselves. So it raises the standard of living and increases the toil of mankind. It is going on increasing the standard of living for the rich, for the middle-class aping the rich, and for the working men aping the middle-class.
Is it good, then, that the standard of living is being raised? Well, no; because the standard of livingnow means the standard of luxury. I should have used that phrase from the beginning.
I said this to a man on the road, and he asked me what I thought a man should live for, but I could not answer him. Each man has his individual destiny to fulfil. Destiny is not a matter of the clothes you wear or of the cushions you sit upon. The beggar pilgrim going in rags to Jerusalem may be more happy than a Pierpont Morgan, who writes pathetically at the head of the bequest of his millions that he believes in the blood of Jesus.
One thing I noted in America, that the blossom of religion seems to have been pressed between Bible leaves, withered and dried long ago. What is called religion is a sort of ethical rampage. The descendants of the Puritans are "probing sin" and "whipping vice." The rich are signing cheques, the hospitals are receiving cheques. The women of the upper classes are visiting the poor and adopting the waifs. But seldom did I come in contact with a man or a woman who stood in humble relation to God or the mystery of life. Even the great passion to put things right, lift the masses, stop corruption, and build beautiful cities and states is begotten in the sureness of science rather than in the fear of the Lord. Far from fearing God, preachers announce from their pulpits that they are "working with Him," or "co-operating with the inevitable tendencies of the world," or "hastening on the work ofevolution." For my part I believe that it is my sacred due to my brother that he be given an opportunity of facing this world, the mystery of its beauty and of his life upon it, that he find out God for himself and learn to pray to Him. But that is at once Eastern and personal.
The Y.M.C.A. informs me as I sit in a car that "The great asset of this town is the young men of this town." Must it be put that way? Is that the only way in which the people of the town can be got to understand how wonderful is the life and promise of any young man, how tender and gentle and lovable he is personally, how unformed, how fresh from his mother and his Creator?
As I go along the road I pick up tracts, sown by the devil, I suppose. Here is one of them:
Verily I say unto you that each and every one of you may be a Count of Monte Christo, and some day exclaim, "The World is mine!"The world was made for you, that I know. That you were made for the world goes without saying.Therefore hear me and believe me. If you desire wealth itcanbe yours. If you desirefameit can be yours.But you cannot get something for nothing. You must pay for everything worth having. You must pay the price set upon it, and in the coin of the realm.The coin of the realm is industry—just that. Industry and only industry. Nothing but industry.
Verily I say unto you that each and every one of you may be a Count of Monte Christo, and some day exclaim, "The World is mine!"
The world was made for you, that I know. That you were made for the world goes without saying.
Therefore hear me and believe me. If you desire wealth itcanbe yours. If you desirefameit can be yours.
But you cannot get something for nothing. You must pay for everything worth having. You must pay the price set upon it, and in the coin of the realm.
The coin of the realm is industry—just that. Industry and only industry. Nothing but industry.
BY THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY TO MICHIGAN
BY THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY TO MICHIGAN: THE ELECTRIC FREIGHT TRAIN.
Poor immigrant, who thinks it would be grand to be a Count of Monte Christo, or, to bring it nearer home, a John D. Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie, and who thinks that honest labour will take him there! Even were American success a thing worth striving for it is not won by that means. It is a game of halma. It's not the man who moves all his pieces out one square at a time who wins, but the sagacious player who knows both to plan in advance and to hop over others when the opportunity arises.
But the good American young man, "the greatest asset of the town," believes this gospel, and he gives his body and mind to the great machine, and fills the gap between two otherwise disconnected mechanisms. If he has been brought up "well," he just fits the gap and is standard size. He feels in his soul every throb of the engines, and registers in his integuments every rhythm and rhyme of the great, accurate, definite, circulating, oscillating machine. He behaves like a machine in his leisure hours. He even dances like a mechanical contrivance. On none of the occasions when the Fatherland requires his sober human judgment can he stand as a man. He seems spoilt for the true citizenship. What he does understand is the improvement, adjustment, and significance of machinery, and he can look intelligently at America the Great Machine. Perhaps this is his function whilst America is realising the dream of materialism andprogress. But America would take care of itself if the American were all right. I could not but have that opinion as I left the cities and walked through the rich country, the new world, as yet scarcely visibly shopsoiled by commercialism.
I came into Forest City along a road made of coal-dust. A black by-path led off to the right down a long gradual slope, and was lost among the culm-heaps of a devastated country side. Miners with sooty faces and heavy coal-dusty moustaches came up in ones and twos and threes, wearing old peak-hats, from the centre of the front of which rose their black nine-inch lamps looking like cockades. They carried large tarnished "grub-cans," they wore old cotton blouses, and showed by unbuttoned buttons their packed, muscular bodies. Shuffling forward up the hill they looked like a different race of men—these divers of the earth. And they were nearly all Russians or Lithuanians or Slavs of one kind or another.
"Mostly foreigners here," said I to an American whom I overtook.
"You can go into that saloon among the crowd and not hear a word of white the whole night," he replied.
I addressed a collier in English.
"Are you an American?"
"No speak English," he replied, and frowned.
"From Russia?" I inquired, in his own tongue.
"And you from where?" he asked with a smile. "Are you looking for a job?"
But before I could answer he sped away to meet a trolly that was just whizzing along to a stopping-place. Presently I myself got into a car and watched in rapid procession the suburbs of Carbondale and Scranton. Black-faced miners waited in knots at the stations all along the road. I read on many rocks and railings the scrawled advertisement, "Buy diamonds from Scurry." Girls crowded into the car from the emptying silk-mills, and they were in slashed skirts, some of them, and all in loud colours, and over-decorated with frills, ribbons, and shoddy jewellery. We came to dreary Iceville, all little grey houses in the shadow of an immense slack mountain. We came into the fumes of Carbondale, where the mines have been on fire ten years; we got glimpses of the far, beautiful hills and the tender green of spring woods set against the soft darkness of abundant mountains. We dived into wretched purlieus where the frame-buildings seemed like flotsam that had drifted together into ridges on the bending earth. We saw dainty little wooden churches with green and yellow domes, the worshipping places of Orthodox Greeks, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and at every turn of the road saw the broad-faced, cavernous-eyed men and the bright-eyed, full-bosomed women of the Slavish nations. I realised that I hadreached the barracks of a portion of America's great army of industrial mercenaries.
I stayed three days at Casey's Hotel in Scranton, and slept nights under a roof once more, after many under the stars. I suppose there was a journalist in the foyer of the hotel, for next morning, when I opened one of the local papers, I read the following impression of my arrival:
With an Alpine rucksack strapped to his back, his shoes thick with coal-dust, and a slouch hat pulled down on all sides to shut out the sun, a tall, raw-boned stranger walked up Lackawanna Avenue yesterday afternoon, walked into the rotunda of the Hotel Casey and actually obtained a room.
With an Alpine rucksack strapped to his back, his shoes thick with coal-dust, and a slouch hat pulled down on all sides to shut out the sun, a tall, raw-boned stranger walked up Lackawanna Avenue yesterday afternoon, walked into the rotunda of the Hotel Casey and actually obtained a room.
Every paper told that I was an Englishman specially interested in Russians and the America of the immigrant. So I needed no further introduction to the people of the town.
Just as I was going into the breakfast-room a bright boy came up to me and asked me in Russian if I were Stephen Graham. "My name is Kuzma," said he. "I am a Little Russian. I read you wanted to know about the Russians here, so I came along to see you."
"Come and have breakfast," said I.
We sat down at a table for two, and considered each a delicately printed sheet entitled, "Some suggestions for your breakfast." Kuzma was thrilled to sit in such a place; he had never been inside the hotel before. It was pretty daring of him to come and seek me there.But Russians are like that, and America is a free country.
As we had our grape-fruit and our coffee and banana cream and various other "suggestions," Kuzma told me his story. He was a Little Russian, or rather a Red Russian or Ruthenian, and came from Galicia. Three years previously he had arrived in New York and found a job as dish-washer at a restaurant, after three months of that he progressed to being bottle-washer at a druggist's, then he became ice-carrier at a hotel. Then another friendly Ruthenian introduced him to a Polish estate agent, who was doing a large business in selling farms to Polish immigrants. As Kuzma knew half a dozen Slavonic dialects the Pole took him away from New York, and sat him in his office at Scranton, putting him into smart American attire, and making a citizen out of a "Kike." I should say for the benefit of English readers that illiterate Russians and Russian Jews are called Kikes, illiterate Italians are "Wops," Hungarians are "Hunkies." These are rather terms of contempt, and the immigrant is happy when he can speak and understand and answer in English, and so can take his stand as an American. After six months' clerking and interpreting Kuzma began to do a little business on his own account, and actually learned how to deal in real estate and sell to his brother Slavs at a profit.
Kuzma, as he sat before me at breakfast, was abright, well-dressed business American. You'd never guess that but three years before he had entered the New World and taken a job as dish-washer. He had seized the opportunity.
"You're a rich man now?" said I.
"So-so. Richer than I could ever be in Galicia. I'm learning English at the High School here, and when I pass my examination I shall begin to do well."
"You are studying?"
"I do a composition every day, on any subject, sometimes I write a little story. I try to write my life for the teacher, but he says I am too ambitious."
"Do you love your Ruthenian brothers and sisters here?"
"No; I prefer the Great Russians."
"You're a very handsome young man. I expect you've got a young lady in your mind now. Is she an American, or one of your own people? Does she live here, or did you leave her away over there, in Europe?"
"I don't think of them. I shall, however, marry a Russian girl."
"Have you many friends here?"
"Very many."
"You will take me to them?"
"Oh yes, with pleasure."
"And where shall we go first? It is Sunday morning. Shall we go to church?"
We left the hotel and went to a large Baptist chapel. When we arrived there we found the whole congregation engaged in Bible study. The people were divided into three sections,—Russians, Ruthenians, Poles. Russians sat together, Ruthenians and Little Russians together, and Poles together. I was most heartily welcomed, and took a place among the circle of Russians, Kuzma being admitted there also, though by rights he should have gone to the other Ruthenians. He was evidently a favourite.
We took the forty-second chapter of Genesis, reading aloud the first verse in Russian, the second in Ruthenian, and the third in Polish. When that was accomplished we prayed in Ruthenian, then we listened to an evangelical sermon in Russian, and then sang, "Nearer, my God, to Thee!" in the same manner as we had read the chapter of Genesis—first verse in Russian, second in Ruthenian, third in Polish. It was strange to find myself singing with Kuzma: