Part 6

From the foot of the path I watched Farrell climb to the shanty door and knock. The door opened and the voices of two men came faintly down to me. My hopes rose, for it was not merely a question and a decisive reply, but the give and take of continued dialogue. The suspense had grown to physical suffering, when I saw Farrell turn from the door and begin to descend the path.

I could not see his face distinctly; but, as he drew nearer, I caught its expression of distress. The half-frightened, worried bewilderment that I had noticed on the day before was back in his eyes, as he stood looking into mine, evidently expecting me to speak. I remained silent.

“I’ve got a job,” he said, presently, and I could have struck him for the joy of it.

“Me troubles is just begun, for the whole town knows me for a bum,” he added, while his anxious eyes moved restlessly behind frowning brows. I said nothing, but waited until I could catch his eye at rest. Then out it came, a little painfully:

“I’ll go to the boarding-house to-night, when me day’s work is done, and put up there, if the missus can take me.”

“Good,” I said, and I waited again until his gaze was steady upon me.

For a day we had tramped together, and slept together for a night, and, quite of his own accord, he had given me his confidence. We were parting, now that he had found work, and I hoped that I might receive the final mark of his trust, so I waited.

He read my question, and his eyes wandered, but they came back to mine, and he spoke up like a man:

“I can’t, till I’m a bit decent again and got some clothes; but I’ll hold down me job, and, as soon as I can, I’ll go back to her.”

A warning whistle blew; Farrell went up the path to take his place in the brick-kiln, and I was soon far down the line in the direction of Utica.

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WITH IOWA FARMERS

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WITH IOWA FARMERS

Scarcely a generalization with the least claim to value can be drawn from my superficial contact with the world of manual labor in America. If there is one, it is, that a man who is able and willing to work can find employment in this country if he will go out in real search for it. It may not be well paid, but it need not be dishonest, and it is difficult to conceive of its failing to afford opportunities of making a way to improved position.

And yet, one has no sooner made such a statement than it becomes necessary to qualify it. Suppose that the worker, able and willing to work, is unemployed in a congested labor market, where the supply far exceeds the demand, and suppose that he must remain with his wife and children, since he cannot desert them and has no means of taking them away. Or imagine him newly landed, thrown upon the streets by an emigrant agency, ignorant of the language and of our methods of work, and especially ignorant of the country itself. To the number of like suppositions there is no end. Actual experience, however, serves to focus the situation. I have stood beside men whom I knew, and have seen them miss the chance of employment because they were so far weakened by the strain of the sweating system that they were incapable of the strain of hard manual labor.

Even at the best, much of the real difficulty is often the subjective one summed up in the sentence of a man who has wide knowledge of wage-earners in America, to whom I once spoke of the surprising ease with which I found employment everywhere, except in larger towns.

“Oh, yes,” he replied; “but you forget how little gifted with imagination the people are who commonly form by far the greater number of the unemployed.”

It merely serves to show again the futility of generalizing about labor, as though it were a commodity like any other, sensitive to the play of the law of supply and demand, while supported by a thorough knowledge of markets and the means of reaching quickly those that, for the time, are the most favorable.

The mass which men speak casually of as “labor” is an aggregation of individuals, each with his human ties and prejudices and his congenital weaknesses and strength, and each with his own salvation to work out through difficulties without and within that are little understood from the outside. You may enter his world and share his life, however rigid, sustained by the knowledge that at any moment you may leave it, and your experience, although the nearest approach that you can make, is yet removed almost by infinity from that of the man at your side, who was born to manual labor and bred to it, and whose whole life, physical and mental, has been moulded by its hard realities.

It would be quite true to say that “the problem of the unemployed in America is a problem of the distribution of workers,” taking them from regions where many men are looking for a job, to other regions, where many jobs are looking for a man. But it would be a shallow truth, with little insight into the real condition of multitudes, whose life-struggle is for day’s bread and in whom the gregarious instinct is an irresistible gravitation. It is not difficult to show that congestion in an industrial centre, with its accompanying misery, might be relieved by an exodus to country districts, where an unsatisfied demand for hands is chronic. But the human adjustments involved in the change would be beyond all calculation; and, even were they effected, it would be not a little disturbing in the end to find large numbers returning to the town, frankly preferring want with companionship and a sense of being in touch with their time to the comparative plenty and, with it, the loneliness and isolation of country living. A part of the penalty that one pays for attempting to deal with elements so fascinating as those of human nature is in their very incalculability, in the elusive charm of men who develop the best that is in them in spite of circumstances the most adverse, and in an evasive quality in others who sometimes fail to respond to the best devised plans for their betterment. But human nature never loses its interest, and, as earnest of a good time coming, there are always men in every generation who, through unselfish service of their fellows, have won

The faith that meets Ten thousand cheats, Yet drops no jot of faith.

However little the fact may have applied to the actual “problem of the unemployed,” it nevertheless was true, as shown in my own experience, that there was a striking contrast throughout the country between a struggle among men for employment and a struggle among employers for men.

Early in the journey I began to note that every near approach to a considerable centre of population was immediately apparent in an increasing difficulty in finding work. I had never a long search in the country or in country villages, and I soon learned to avoid cities, unless I was bent upon another errand than that of employment.

I could easily have escaped Chicago and its crowded labor market. Offers of places in the late autumn as general utility man on farms in northern Ohio and Indiana were plentiful as I passed, and I well knew, during a fortnight’s fruitless search for work in Chicago in early winter, that at any time a day’s march from the city, or two days’ march at most, would take me to regions where the difficulty would quickly disappear. The temptation to quit the experiment altogether, or, at least, to go out to the more hospitable country, was then strong at times; but I could but realize that, in yielding, I should be abandoning a very real phase of the experience of unskilled labor, that of unemployment, and that I should miss the chance of some contact with bodies of organized skilled workmen as well as with the revolutionaries who can be easiest found in our larger towns. So I remained, and for two weeks I saw and, in an artificial way, I felt something of the grim horror of being penniless on the streets of a city in winter, quite able and most willing to work, yet unable to find any steady employment.

With the return of spring I went into the country again, drifting on with no more definite plan than that of going westward until I should reach the Pacific; and here at once was the contrast. Opportunities of work everywhere; with farmers, when one was on the country roads; in brick-kilns, when bad walking drove one to the railway lines.

Farrell, a fellow-tramp for a day on the Rock Island Railway in Illinois, had, for seven weeks, been looking for work from Omaha to Lima and back again, he told me, and yet he got a job near Ottawa in response to his first inquiry; while a few miles farther down the line I, too, was offered work in a brick-kiln at Utica. I did not accept it, only because I had savings enough from my last job to see me through to Davenport.

It was on the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 1892, that I reached Davenport. I had followed the line of the Rock Island Railway from Morris, sleeping in brick-kilns, and, one night, at Bureau Junction, in a shed by the village church, and I was a bit fagged. I had developed a plan to go to Minneapolis. I hoped to work the passage as a hand on a river boat.