The Workers: An Experiment in Reality: The East
9781465655288
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The boss at the work on the old Academic building in West Point gave me a job this morning, and ordered me to come to work to-morrow at seven o'clock. A gang of laborers is fast removing the old building, which is to give place to a new one. From one of the workmen I learned that the men live in Highland Falls, a mile down the river, and so I came here in search of a boarding-house. There was some difficulty in finding quarters, for the place is crowded with workingmen attracted here by the new buildings at the Post and work on the railway. Mrs. Flaherty has taken me in as a boarder. That is not her name, but it sufficiently indicates her. She came to the door with the odor of soap-suds and boiling cabbage strong upon her, and told me at first that she guessed that she couldn't take me. She relented when I explained that I had work at the Post; and, having admitted me as a member of her household, she gave play to her natural hospitality. When I was shown to a little carpetless room under the roof, with two double beds in it, I spoke of needing water, and she showed me where I could get a plentiful supply. I said that I should like to write, and she at once invited me from the torrid heat of the attic to a place at her dining-room table. Here then, in the temporary security of a boarding-house, and as an assigned member of the industrial army, I can review the first week of enlisted service. I am vastly ignorant of the labor problem, and am trying to learn by experience; but I am so far familiar with Socialistic writings as to know that, from their point of view, I have not gone from one economic class into another. I belong to the proletariat, and from being one of the intellectual proletarians, I am simply become a manual proletaire. In other words, I no longer stand in the market ready to sell what mental ability I have, I now bring to the market instead my physical capacity for work; and I sell that at its market price. Expressed in every-day language, the change is simply this: from earning a living as a teacher, I have begun to earn it as an unskilled laborer. But, nevertheless, the change has in it elements of real contrast. One week ago I shared the frictionless life of a country-seat. Frictionless, I mean, in the movement of an elaborate system which ministers luxuriously to the physical needs of life. Frictionless, perhaps, only to those to whom it ministers. Now I am out of all that, and am sharing instead the life of the humblest form of labor upon which that superstructure rests. This is not a frictionless life in its adjustment to daily needs—very much the reverse. And whatever may be its compensations, they are not of the nature of easy physical existence. The actual step from the one manner of life to the other was sure of its own interest. It was painful to say good-by on the last evening, and there was enough of uncertainty in the prospect to account for a shrinking from the first encounter with a strange life; but there was promise of adventure, and almost a certainty of solid gain in experience. At sunrise on the next morning I was ready to set out. I descended quietly to the hall. The butler stood there, politely urging some pretended necessity as excuse for so early an appearance, and he invited me to breakfast. Often had he seen me off for a day's fishing or shooting in the old suit which I wore, but I could feel his eye fixed upon me now with perplexed interest. He had heard my expedition discussed at the table, and in some vague way he took in that I meant to earn my living as a workman. With his wonted dignity, he helped me adjust my pack and strap it; and then he stood under the porte cochère, and watched me hurry across the lawn in the direction of the highway.
