I suppose I could not have fairly claimed any great originality for my
notion that the walking delegate was the cause of the labor troubles: he
is regularly assigned as the reason of a strike in the newspapers, and is
reprobated for his evil agency by the editors, who do not fail to read the
working-men many solemn lessons and fervently warn them against him, as
soon as the strike begins to go wrong--as it nearly always does. I
understand from them that the walking delegate is an irresponsible tyrant,
who emerges from the mystery that habitually hides him and from time to
time orders a strike in mere rancor of spirit and plenitude of power, and
then leaves the working-men and their families to suffer the consequences,
while he goes off somewhere and rolls in the lap of luxury, careless of
the misery he has created. Between his debauches of vicious idleness and
his accesses of baleful activity he is employed in poisoning the mind of
the working-men against his real interests and real friends. This is
perfectly easy, because the American working-man, though singularly shrewd
and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable
obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and
real friends--or, at least, from knowing them when he sees them.
There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person
that the walking delegate was the source of the discontent among our
proletariate, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval
of the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit
the nail on the head this time; and the minister seemed to be freshly
impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the
doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he
was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my chagrin, broke into a laugh. “I’m
afraid,” he said, with a sardonic levity which surprised me, “you’ll have
to go a good deal deeper than the walking delegate. He’s a symptom; he
isn’t the disease. The thing keeps on and on, and it seems to be always
about wages; but it isn’t about wages at the bottom. Some of those fellows
know it and some of them don’t, but the real discontent is with the whole
system, with the nature of things. I had a curious revelation on that
point the last time I tried to deal with my men as a union. They were
always bothering me about this and about that, and there was no end to the
bickering. I yielded point after point, but it didn’t make any difference.
It seemed as if the more I gave the more they asked. At last I made up my
mind to try to get at the real inwardness of the matter, and I didn’t wait
for their committee to come to me--I sent for their leading man, and said
I wanted to have it out with him. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and when I got
at him, man to man that way, I found he had sense, and he had ideas--it’s
no use pretending those fellows are fools; he had thought about his side
of the question, anyway. I said: ‘Now what does it all mean? Do you want
the earth, or don’t you? When is it going to end?’ I offered him something
to take, but he said he didn’t drink, and we compromised on cigars. ‘Now
when is it going to end?’ said I, and I pressed it home, and wouldn’t let
him fight off from the point. ‘Do you mean when is it all going to end?’
said he. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘all. I’m sick of it. If there’s any way out I’d
like to know it.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I’ll tell you, if you want to know.
It’s all going to end when you get the same amount of money for the same
amount of work as we do.’”
We all laughed uproariously. The thing was deliciously comical; and
nothing, I thought, attested the Altrurian’s want of humor like his
failure to appreciate this joke. He did not even smile in asking: “And
what did you say?”
“Well,” returned the manufacturer, with cosey enjoyment, “I asked him if
the men would take the concern and run it themselves.” We laughed again;
this seemed even better than the other joke. “But he said, ‘No’; they
would not like to do that. And then I asked him just what they would like,
if they could have their own way, and he said they would like to have me
run the business, and all share alike. I asked him what was the sense of
that, and why, if I could do something that all of them put together
couldn’t do, I shouldn’t be paid more than all of them put together; and
he said that if a man did his best he ought to be paid as much as the best
man. I asked him if that was the principle their union was founded on, and
he said, ‘Yes,’ that the very meaning of their union was the protection of
the weak by the strong and the equalization of earnings among all who do
their best.”
We waited for the manufacturer to go on, but he made a dramatic pause at
this point, as if to let it sink into our minds; and he did not speak
until the Altrurian prompted him with the question, “And what did you
finally do?”
“I saw there was only one way out for me, and I told the fellow I did not
think I could do business on that principle. We parted friends, but the
next Saturday I locked them out and smashed their union. They came back,
most of them--they had to--but I’ve treated with them ever since ‘as
individuals.’”
“And they’re much better off in your hands than they were in the union,”
said the professor.
“I don’t know about that,” said the manufacturer, “but I’m sure I am.”
We laughed with him, all but the minister, whose mind seemed to have
caught upon some other point, and who sat absently by.
“And is it your opinion, from what you know of the working-man generally,
that they all have this twist in their heads?” the professor asked.
“They have, until they begin to rise. Then they get rid of it mighty soon.
Let a man save something--enough to get a house of his own, and take a
boarder or two, and perhaps have a little money at interest--and he sees
the matter in another light.”
“Do you think he sees it more clearly?” asked the minister.
“He sees it differently.”
“What do you think?” the minister pursued, turning to the lawyer. “You are
used to dealing with questions of justice--”
“Rather more with questions of law, I’m afraid,” the other returned,
pleasantly, putting his feet together before him and looking down at them
in a way he had. “But, still, I have a great interest in questions of
justice, and I confess that I find a certain wild equity in this
principle, which I see nobody could do business on. It strikes me as
idyllic--it’s a touch of real poetry in the rough-and-tumble prose of our
economic life.”
He referred this to me as something I might appreciate in my quality of
literary man, and I responded in my quality of practical man: “There’s
certainly more rhyme than reason in it.”
He turned again to the minister:
“I suppose the ideal of the Christian state is the family?”
“I hope so,” said the minister, with the gratitude that I have seen people
of his cloth show when men of the world conceded premises which the world
usually contests; it has seemed to me pathetic.
“And if that is the case, why, the logic of the postulate is that the
prosperity of the weakest is the sacred charge and highest happiness of
all the stronger. But the law has not recognized any such principle, in
economics at least, and if the labor unions are based upon it they are
outlaw, so far as any hope of enforcing it is concerned; and it is bad for
men to feel themselves outlaw. How is it,” the lawyer continued, turning
to the Altrurian, “in your country? We can see no issue here, if the first
principle of organized labor antagonizes the first principle of business.”
“But I don’t understand precisely yet what the first principle of business
is,” returned my guest.
“Ah, that raises another interesting question,” said the lawyer. “Of
course, every business man solves the problem practically according to his
temperament and education, and I suppose that on first thoughts every
business man would answer you accordingly. But perhaps the personal
equation is something you wish to eliminate from the definition.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Still, I would rather not venture upon it first,” said the lawyer.
“Professor, what should you say was the first principle of business?”
“Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest,” the professor
promptly answered.
“We will pass the parson and the doctor and the novelist as witnesses of
no value. They can’t possibly have any cognizance of the first principle
of business; their affair is to look after the souls and bodies and
fancies of other people. But what should you say it was?” he asked the
banker.
“I should say it was an enlightened conception of one’s own interests.”
“And you?”
The manufacturer had no hesitation in answering: “The good of Number One,
first, last, and all the time. There may be a difference of opinion about
the best way to get at it; the long way may be the better, or the short
way; the direct way or the oblique way, or the purely selfish way, or the
partly selfish way; but if you ever lose sight of that end you might as
well shut up shop. That seems to be the first law of nature, as well as
the first law of business.”
“Ah, we mustn’t go to nature for our morality,” the minister protested.
“We were not talking of morality,” said the manufacturer; “we were talking
of business.”
This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short:
“Well, then, I don’t really see why the trades-unions are not as
business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside
of themselves. Within themselves they practise an altruism of the highest
order, but it is a tribal altruism; it is like that which prompts a Sioux
to share his last mouthful with a starving Sioux, and to take the scalp of
a starving Apache. How is it with your trades-unions in Altruria?” he
asked my friend.
“We have no trades-unions in Altruria,” he began.
“Happy Altruria!” cried the professor.
“We had them formerly,” the Altrurian went on, “as you have them now. They
claimed, as I suppose yours do, that they were forced into existence by
the necessities of the case; that without union the working-man was unable
to meet the capitalist on anything like equal terms, or to withstand his
encroachments and oppressions. But to maintain themselves they had to
extinguish industrial liberty among the working-men themselves, and they
had to practise great cruelties against those who refused to join them or
who rebelled against them.”
“They simply destroy them here,” said the professor.
“Well,” said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, “the great syndicates
have no scruples in destroying a capitalist who won’t come into them or
who tries to go out. They don’t club him or stone him, but they under-sell
him and freeze him out; they don’t break his head, but they bankrupt him.
The principle is the same.”
“Don’t interrupt Mr. Homos,” the banker entreated. “I am very curious to
know just how they got rid of labor unions in Altruria.”
“We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the _reductio ad absurdum_--we
had a federation of labor unions find a federation of syndicates, that
divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible,
but it was insupportably ridiculous.”