AT BREAKFAST
The day was dawning by this time, and the conversation was broken up.
Constant set to work to prepare breakfast while the others extinguished
the lanterns, trimmed them, filled them with oil, and “cleaned up”
generally.
When breakfast was served, the scarcity of supplies was apparent.
There were some “cold-water hoecakes,”--that is to say, bread made of
corn-meal mixed up with cold water and a little salt, and baked in cakes
about half or three quarters of an inch thick upon a griddle. There was
a dish of fried salt pork, and with it some fried potatoes. And there
was nothing else, except a “private dish” consisting of two slices of
toast made from the scrap of stale wheat bread left, with a poached egg
on each of them. There was no coffee and no butter, the last remains of
that having been used upon the toast.
The “private dish,” Constant explained, was for Ed. “You see, we’re
out to get him well, and his digestive apparatus doesn’t take kindly
to fried things. I’ve saved four more eggs for him--the last we’ve
got,--and six more slices of stale wheat bread. The rest of you are
barbarians, and you’ll wrestle with any sort of hash I can get up till
we get to Memphis.”
Ed protested vigorously against the favoritism shown him, but the others
supported Constant’s plan, and the older boy had to yield.
“Well, I am deeply grateful for your kindness, boys,” he said, “and I’m
duly grateful also to the thousands of men in various parts of the
country who have worked so hard to furnish me with these two slices of
toast.”
The boys looked up from their plates.
“Here’s another revelation,” said Irv. “My ill-furnished intelligence is
about to receive another supply of much-needed rudimentary information.
Go on, Ed. Tell us about it. How in the world do you figure out your
‘thousands’ of men who have had anything to do with those two slices of
toast?”
“Oh, that was a joke,” said Will.
“It was nothing of the kind,” answered Ed. “I can’t possibly count up
all the people who have worked hard to give me this toast, but they
certainly number greatly more than a thousand.”
“We’re only waiting for wisdom to drop from your lips--” began Irv, with
his drawl.
“O, quit it, Irv!” said Phil; “you’ll learn more by listening than by
talking.”
“That is probably so,” said the other, “though I remember that we heard
something away up the river, about how much a person learns of a subject
by talking about it.”
“Yes, but--”
“Listen,” said Ed, “and I’ll explain. The wheat out of which this toast
was made was grown probably in Dakota or Minnesota. There was a farmer
there, and perhaps there were some farm-hands also, who ploughed the
ground, sowed the seed, reaped the wheat, threshed it, winnowed it, and
all that. Then--”
“Yes, but all that wouldn’t include more than half a dozen,” said Phil.
“Yes, it would,” said Irv, “for there’s all the womenfolk who cooked
the men’s meals and--”
“Never mind them,” said Ed, “though of course they helped to give me my
toast. Let’s count only those that contributed directly to that kindly
end. These farmer people used ploughs, harrows, drills, reapers,
threshing-machines, wagons, and all that, and somebody must have made
them. And back of those who made them were those who dug the iron for
them out of the ground, and cut the wood in them out of the forest, and
the men who made the tools with which they did all this, and--”
“I see,” said Irv. “It’s the biggest endless chain imaginable.
Thousands? Why, thousands had a hand in it before you even get to the
farmer--the men who made the tools, and the men who made the tools that
made the tools, and so on back to the very beginnings of creation. And
if we face about, there are the men that ran the railroads which hauled
the wheat to mill, and the millers, and all that. Oh, the thousand are
easy enough to make out.”
“Yes,” said Ed, “and then the railroads and the mills had to be built.
The men that built them, the engineers, mechanics, and laborers, all
helped to give me my two slices of toast. So did the men behind them,
the men who made their tools and their materials, the woodsmen who
chopped trees for ties, the miners who dug the iron, the smelters, the
puddlers, the rolling-mill men, who wrought the crude ore into steel
rails; then there are all the men who made the locomotives, and the
cars, and the machinery of the mills, and--”
“Oh, stop for mercy’s sake,” said Will. “It’s no use to count. There
aren’t thousands, but millions of them. And of course the same thing is
true of our clothes, our shoes, and everything else.”
“But with so many people’s work represented in it,” asked Irv,
reflectively, “why isn’t that piece of toast an enormously costly
affair?”
“Simply _because_ so many people’s work is represented in it,” answered
Ed. “If one man had to do it all for himself, it would never be done at
all. Just imagine a man set down on the earth with no tools and nobody
to help him. How much buttered toast do you suppose he would be able to
turn out in a year? Why, before he could get so much as a hoe he would
have to travel hundreds of miles, dig some iron and coal, cut wood with
which to convert the coal into coke, melt the iron out of its ore,
change it into steel, and shape it into a hoe. Why, even a hoe would
cost him a year’s hard work or more, while a wagon he could hardly make
without tools in a lifetime. Now he can earn the price of a hoe in a few
hours, and the cost of a wagon in a few days or weeks, simply because
everybody works for everybody else, each man doing only the thing that
he can do best.”
“Then we all work for each other without knowing it,” said Will.
“Of course we do. When we fellows were diving for that pig-iron, we were
working for the thousands of people who will use or profit by the things
that somebody else will make out of that pig-iron and--”
“And for the somebody else,” said Irv, “that will make those things out
of the pig-iron, and for all the ‘somebody elses’ that work for them,
and so on in every direction! Whew! it makes my head swim to think of
it. But what a nabob you are, Ed! Just think! Thousands and even
millions of people are, at this moment, at work to make you
comfortable!”
“Yes, and each one of the millions is at work for all the others while
all the others are at work for him. Theorists sometimes dream out
systems of ‘coöperative industry,’ hoping in that way to better men’s
condition. But their very wildest dreams do not even approach the
complex and perfectly working coöperation we already have in use.”
“Just think of it!” said Irv. “Suppose that every man in our little town
of two or three thousand people had to do everything for himself! He
would have to raise sheep for wool, card, spin, and weave it, and
fashion it into clothes. He would have to raise cotton and linen in the
same way, and cattle too, and keep a tannery and be a shoemaker and a
farmer and a mason and a carpenter and all the rest of it. And then he
would have to mine his own iron and coal, and make his own tools
and--well, he wouldn’t do it, because he couldn’t. He’d just wander off
into the woods hunting for something that he could kill and eat, and
he’d try to kill anybody else that did the same thing, for fear that the
somebody else would get some of the game that he wanted for himself.
He’d be simply a savage!”
“Well, but even savages go in tribes and hunt together and live
together,” said Will.
“Of course they do,” answered Ed, “and that’s their first step up toward
civilization. When they do that they have learned in a small way the
advantage of working together, each for all and all for each. The better
they learn that lesson, the more civilized they become.”
“Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything and
everybody to work for the state and be supported by it?” asked Phil.
“Not a little bit of it,” said Ed. “That would be simply to go back to
the tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize the
advantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. We
have worked out of that and into something better. With us, every man
works for all the rest by working for himself in the way that best
serves his own welfare. Under our system every man is urged and
stimulated by self-interest to do the very best and most work that he
can. Under a communistic or socialistic or tribal system, every man
would be as lazy as the rest would let him be, because he would be sure
of a share in all that the others might make by their labor. It is
sharp competition that makes men do their best. It is in the ‘struggle
for existence’ that men advance most rapidly.”
“Wonder if that wasn’t what Humboldt meant,” said Irv, “when he called
the banana ‘the curse of the tropics,’ adding that when a man planted
one banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendants
to the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessity
for clothes.”
“Exactly,” said Ed. “Somebody once said that ‘every man is as lazy as he
dares to be.’”
“Well, I am, anyhow,” yawned Irv, “and so I’m going up on deck under the
awning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night.”