The “labor question”—how to get half enough to eat by working for it—is
as old as appetite. It burned in Assyrian bosoms and tormented the soul
of the ancient Egyptian. In his day and country the medium of exchange
was grain. The banks—all except those of the Nile—were granaries, and
a check was an order for so much grain. Taxes were paid in grain,
salaries and bribes of state officials, soldiers’ wages, pensions,
nearly everything. The wages of laborers and other persons improvident
enough to work by the day were commonly paid in loaves of bread, as
is shown by an account-book of the steward of an “Abode of Rameses,”
which was possibly the Ramesseum at Thebes. Among the entries are such
as this: “Phamenoth the 8th day. Paid out the bread to the folk, 40
persons, each 2 loaves, making 80”—which shows, too, that the worthy
steward had a very pretty knack at arithmetic. When paid by the month,
and sometimes when paid by the day, the laborer receiving his wages in
corn got also a certain stated quantity of oil, which, however, was not
considered as money, but as rations. In a _papyrus_ preserved at Turin
one Hanefer imparts some directions to one Hora concerning certain
characteristic work of these old pyramid and temple builders: “Note
that the men be divided into three gangs, each gang under its captain:
six hundred men, making for each gang two hundred. Make them drag the
three great blocks which are before the gate of the temple of Maut, and
not for one single day let it be omitted to give out their portions
of corn and oil.... Also let oil be given to each driver of a pair of
oxen.”
Strikes and other “remedial measures” appear to have been as common
then as they are now. The unions, like those of Rome later, were
turbulent and insurgent.
In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III a deputation of workmen
employed in the Theban necropolis met the superintendent and the
priests with a statement of their grievances. “Behold,” said the
spokesman, “we are brought to the verge of famine. We have neither
food, nor oil, nor clothing; we have no fish; we have no vegetables.
Already we have sent up a petition to our sovereign lord the Pharaoh,
praying that he will give us these things, and we are going to appeal
to the governor that we may have the wherewithal to live.” The response
to this complaint was one day’s rations of corn. This appears to have
been enough only while it lasted, for a few weeks later the workmen
were in open revolt. Thrice they broke out of their quarter, rioting
like mad and defying the police. Whether they were finally shot full of
arrows by the Pinkerton men of the period the record does not state.
“Organized discontent” in the laboring population is no new thing under
the sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity, and
Omniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be very
sure, and the sooner the “capitalist” can persuade himself to discern
it the sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those
who are able to live without physical toil and those who are not are a
long way from final adjustment, but are about to undergo a profound
and essential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution
is a hope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to
be bloody noses and cracked crowns, and the good persons who suffer
themselves to be shocked by such things in others will have a chance
to try them for themselves. The working man is not troubling himself
greatly about a just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater
part go to those who do not work with their hands, he will not consider
too curiously any one’s claim to exemption. It would perhaps better
harmonize with his sense of the fitness of things if the disadvantages
of the transitional period fell mostly to the share of his benefactors;
but almost any distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a
whole to the other side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the
meantime it is to be wished that the moralizers and homilizers who
prate of “principles” may have a little damnation dealt out to them on
account. The head that is unable to entertain a philosophical view of
the situation would be notably advantaged by removal.