"I speak in the interests of Capital," he said, "when I declare that the
fault is not all on the side of the working man. Many of our employers
are kind and sympathetic men, but others of them are not. I envy no man
among you the wealth he has gathered, but the selfishness of some of our
manufacturers is maddening to the working man.
"Some of you know nothing of our trials and our difficulties, and, what
is worse, you do not want to know. You pass by the men who are making
you rich as though they were the dogs of the street. You sit next pew to
them in the kirk, and yet treat them like the dirt beneath your feet. It
is doubtless your conviction that you have discharged your whole duty to
us when you pay our wages every fortnight. I tell you," he cried
passionately, "that is the great fallacy which is yet to prove the
undoing of the employers of labour.
"You forget we are men, as well as you, and have higher claims upon you
than your pay sheet acknowledges. If our employer dies, we follow him in
a body to his grave. If one of us dies, you drive past his hearse with
your haughty carriages, or bolt down a side street to avoid the
association.
"Tom Lamplough, who has worked for Mr. Thoburn twenty years, buried his
only child last Thursday, and his employer spent the afternoon speeding
his thoroughbred on the race-track beside the cemetery. At the very
moment when Tom was groping about the open grave, struggling with his
broken heart and following his daughter with streaming eyes, Mr. Thoburn
was bawling out that his filly had done it in two and a quarter--and the
clods were falling on the coffin all the while."
At this juncture Thoburn arose, his face the very colour of the corpse
he had disdained.
"Will no man throttle this fanatic?" he hoarsely craved. "Must we be
insulted thus by a mere working man?"
"I insult no man," retorted his accuser, "when I tell him but the truth.
It was you who insulted the dead, and outraged her desolate father
because he was but your servant. Is what I say the truth?"
"I decline to answer that," said Thoburn.
"You will not decline to answer before the throne of God. For you and
Tom will meet yonder. Good God, man, did you ever think of that? Did it
ever occur to you that you and Tom will take your last ride in the same
conveyance, and have the same upholstery in the tomb? And somebody
else's filly will be making its mile in less time than yours when the
clods are falling on your coffin."
I have often marvelled at this strange power of rhetoric in an untutored
man; but it only confirmed what I am more and more inclined to
believe--that emotion and intellect are twins, and that the soul is
oratory's native home.
There was a pause, but it was brief. For there flew to the rescue of his
beleaguered brother Mr. Hiram Orme, the millionaire proprietor of the
great Acme works. Vulgar and proud, he lived a life of ostentatious
luxury.
No thought of the poor or the suffering ever disturbed the shallow tenor
of his enamelled existence Secure in the fortress of wealth, which is a
lie! he cared nothing for such wounded soldiers as had helped to build
it, or for their widows or their orphans. With all sail set, he careened
on his inconsiderate way, and the vessels whose side he sought were
never those bearing the signals of distress.
Mr. Hiram Orme had a high contempt for all working men, and a keen
suspicion of every attitude which smacked of liberty. The working man,
like the negro, was happier far in a state of semi-slavery--such was the
honest view of the honest man.
And now he was upon his feet, glaring with wrath, profoundly complacent
in the assurance of superior wealth, and prepared to demolish both Angus
and the King's English at a blow.
"Them's nice words," he broke forth, "for a working man to be using to
the man what he's dependent on for to get his bread and butter. And I
want for to tell this man Strachan that beggars can't be choosers. A
pretty preachment he's givin' us about coffins and them like things.
There's one thing certain, and that is, me and the rest of my brother
manufacturers will have a sight finer coffins than him and his sort will
have." The manufacturers shuddered, like men sitting in some deadly
draught.
"We've had jist about enough sass from our young friend, I think; he's
nothin' but a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for us anyhow.
Doesn't the Bible tell servants like him for to be obedient to their
masters?"
Then Angus's Scotch blood leaped, protesting, to his face, and his soul
tore open his burning lips as the tide bursts a dam built by children's
hands.
"I eat honest bread, earned by honest toil," he hotly cried, "and that
is more than Mr. Orme can say. I would beg from door to door before I
would munch, as he does, the crusts that are stained with blood. We all
know how he has ground his working girls to the earth, how he has
refused to ventilate his factories, and even to heat them decently in
the winter time. We all know how he has spurned the poor and the needy
with his foot, and how he has crawled upon his belly before the rich and
great. I will tell you something about Mr. Orme. It does not apply to
all of you. Some of you, thank God! have remembered that your working
men were human beings like yourselves--you have helped and befriended
the sick and the poor, you have pensioned the closing years of faithful
men. You have called yourselves to ask for our sick and dying, and we
have blessed you for it. What poor burdened hearts want is the warm
heart touch from your own hands or lips, but Mr. Orme has given neither
the one nor the other.
"Mr. Orme, do you remember Dick Draper, who was your boss carder, and
who lives in a little house behind your mansion? Do you remember that he
worked for you ten or fifteen years, and that you discharged him because
he would not leave the Union?"
"Yes, I remember him. Why?" answered Orme huskily.
"I will tell you why. A few months after you discharged him, partly
because his health failed and partly because you blackballed him at all
other shops, he was still out of work, his money all gone, his pantry
bare, and his youngest boy dying of a slow disease of the spine. Some of
us went to you and asked you to help us raise enough to send him to
Montreal for treatment that might save his life. You showed us the door,
and told us to tell him he could make his money like you made yours. You
said if the boy died it would be one mouth less for Dick to feed, and
told us there was a grand old maxim about every man for himself and the
devil have the hindermost. As we were going down your splendid avenue,
you shouted that Dick's spine was stiff enough when he joined the Union.
Then you asked us if spines were hereditary. Then you laughed and your
barns and your grand driving sheds echoed back its cruel mockery."
Orme arose and started towards the door.
"Mr. Chairman, I protest," he began.
"Sit doon," thundered Angus, lapsing into his native tongue, "sit doon
till I tell ye a'. The nicht Dick's boy was deein', we went to ye and
begged ye to stop yir music and yir dancin'. For ye had some graun' fowk
at yir pairty, an' the flowers for it cost ye mair nor wad hae sent the
laddie to Montreal. An' the noise fashed an' fretted the deein' bairn.
But ye bade us begone, an' said ye'd invite us to yir pairty when ye
wanted us--an' the puir laddie dee'd in his faither's airms to the cruel
music o' yir fiddles an' yir reels, an' his faither sat wi' him a' the
nicht, croonin' wi' sorrow, an' yir graun' guests' laughter breakin' on
him like a blizzard frae the north."
"Is the sermon nearly done?" said Mr. Orme, with a sneer. "You missed
your calling; you're a preacher." The hot tears were in Angus' eyes and
he seemed to have forgotten that Orme was present, the taunt lost upon
him.
"I will say no more," turning now to the others, "and I have perhaps
spoken over warmly. But I have uttered no word other than the truth. And
I will only make my last appeal, which I know will have some weight,
with most of you, at least. The remedy for all this threatening trouble
lies in mutual sympathy, for I doubt not you have your own difficulties,
even as we have ours. I am glad to have helped to allay this recent
trouble, and my best service shall never be denied you in the future.
But I pray you to consider the words of a man who wishes you nothing
else but good. Pardon what of violence and ponder what of reason has
been mixed with what I said. Capital has its labour, and labour has its
capital--and we are all toilers together."
He bowed to the employers and withdrew, but the seed his hand had cast
was fallen, some no doubt on rocky ground, but some also on good and
honest soil.
And Angus had won a victory; but his greatest triumph was unseen, for he
had ruled his own spirit, which high authority assures us is greater
than the taking of a city.
Not inconsiderable, too, were the outward pledges of his victory. For,
as we said, the sleek agitators had been dismissed, the mills and
factories were running again, and the industrial tides of life in New
Jedboro gradually subsided into their old channels.
And now those unseen forces that are ever silently working to upset old
standards and to displace old ways, broke out in a new form, this time
threatening the very centre of one of St. Cuthbert's most established
customs.