CHAPTER IV

A HAND-TRUCKMAN IN A FACTORY

No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO, Wednesday, February 3, 1892.

At half-past five this afternoon I completed seven weeks of service as a hand-truckman in a factory. Mrs. Schultz, my landlady, tells me that she is sorry that I am going away; and now that the long-looked-for end is come, I am not in the least elated, as I thought that I should be. But the days are lengthening markedly with the promise of the coming spring, and I am forcefully reminded that the time grows short for the study at close range of much that still awaits me in this great working city before I can well set out again upon my westward journey.

Seven weeks as a factory-hand is very little. Like all phases of my experiment, it is but the lightest touch upon the surface of the life which I seek to understand. Strong and infinitely appealing are the basal elements of existence, and yet mysterious, evasive, receding like a spectre from your craving grasp. And in the secret of its veiled presence speaks a Voice: “Only through living is it given unto men to know; none but the heaven-sent may know otherwise. Not by experiment, but only through the poignancy of real agony and joy is my secret learned.”

As a witness of certain external conditions and as a sharer in them, I may tell nothing but the truth, and yet the whole truth reaches far beyond the compass of my vision--the joys and creature comforts of men whose birth and breeding and life-long training fit them smoothly to circumstances which seem to me all friction; the blind human agony of these men, as necessity bears hard upon them, and, helpless, they watch the sufferings of their wives and children, and have no hope nor any escape but death; the unconscious delight in living intensely in the present with easy adjustment to homely surroundings, and no anxious thought for the future and no morbid introspection; the sharply conscious endurance of grim realities, which baffle the untrained reason and paralyze the will, and make of a strong man a terrified child in the grip of the superstitious horrors of disease, and loss of work, and the “bad luck” which plays so large a part in that sordid thing which he calls life.

For seven weeks I have worked daily in the company of two thousand hands, and have lived with half a score of them in a tenement-house near the factory, and yet I am leaving them with but the slenderest knowledge of their lives.

It was one bitter cold morning a little past the middle of December that I was taken on. I had had a good supper on the night before and a sound night’s sleep; and the pleasure of being set to work once more, of being caught up again into the meaningful movement of men, was tempered only by a lack of breakfast and a long walk through the cold gray dawn.

Crist was my boss. Crist is foreman of the gangs of men who load the box-cars which flank the long platforms beside the warehouses of the factory. Wide sloping eaves project from the buildings’ sides to a point nearly over the edge of the platforms, and under these are stored the new mowers and reapers and harvesters, gay in gorgeous paint, and reduced to the point of easiest handling, their subordinate parts near by in compact crates and boxes, all ready for immediate shipment.

The proper loading of the cars is a work requiring great skill and ingenuity on Crist’s part; for the men it is the mere muscular carrying out of his directions. Under Crist’s guidance the superficial area of a car is made to hold an incredible amount. By long practice he has learned the greatest possible economy of space, in the nice adjustments of varying bulks, so that each load is a maximum, in point of number, of complete machines.

There was like shrewdness, I thought, in his handling of the men. After his first orders to me I came almost not at all under his direct control through the few days in which I worked in his department. But I had many opportunities then and later, too, of observing him. A tall, old, lithe Norwegian, with a certain awkward, lanky efficiency of movement, he had the mild manner and the soft, low speech of the hard-of-hearing. He never blustered, certainly, and apparently he never swore, but the men under him worked without hurry and without intervals in a way which told superbly in the total work accomplished.

A gang of six or eight laborers under his direction was just beginning the loading of an empty box-car when I was taken on. They were stalwart, hardy workmen for the most part, their faces aglow in the cold, their muscular bodies warmly clothed, and the folded rims of their heavy woollen caps drawn down to protect their ears. Over their work-stained overalls some of them wore thick leather aprons which were darkened and polished by wear to the appearance of well-seasoned razor-strops, and on their hands they all wore stout gloves or mittens, which, through long use, had reached a perfect flexibility and fitness to their work.

“John,” said Crist, addressing one of the gang, a short, rather slender Irishman, with a smooth-shaven, sallow face, “John, you take this man and fetch down the dry tongues from the paint-shop. There’s the wagon-truck,” and he pointed to a vehicle whose heavy box, open at both ends, and rising at the sides to a height of three feet, was supported on two small iron wheels, while an iron leg under the heavier end kept the bottom of the truck horizontal.

“Yes, sir,” came instantly from John, as he stepped alertly from among the men and joined me, his small, gray eyes looking inquisitively into mine and showing in their sudden light the pleasure which he felt in being thus singled out for special work and put in charge of a new hand.

“Come this way,” he said to me. “Me and you is partners. What’s your name? My name’s John, John Barry. Some calls me Jake, but my name’s John,” he concluded, with an emphasis which made it clear that he had a rooted objection to “Jake.”

Barry’s Christian name I considered a poaching upon my preserve, and I was feeling about for a new handy prænomen; but without waiting for an answer he continued swiftly on his loquacious way, calling me “partner” the while, as Clark had done, and “partner” I remained through the days of our co-labor.

Barry was an old hand; he knew his way about the factory perfectly. We pushed the truck before us into a warehouse and through a long, dim passage between piles of various portions of the various machines which rose to the ceiling in compact stacks on both sides of us as we walked the great length of the building. It was as dark as a tunnel, except where an occasional gas-jet burned brightly in the centre of a misty halo. The cold, unchanging air that never knew the sunlight chilled us to the bone, and near the gas we could see our breath rising in clouds of white vapor. We came at last to an elevator, and, having pushed our truck aboard, we rose to the next landing. Then down another long, dark, damp passage we passed until we reached a covered bridge, a run-way, as the men call it, which sloped upward to the paint-shop in the main building of the factory.

The spring-doors at the head of the bridge flew open to the sharp ram of our truck, and we followed into a large room which was flooded with sunlight from its serried windows. There appeared to be hundreds of “binders” in the room, all painted white and extending in long, straight rows on wooden supports which held them a few feet from the floor. Among these rows moved the men who “stripe” the binders. Their hands and clothing were daubed with paint, and even as we passed we could see the slender, even lines of brilliant color appearing as by magic along the white surface of the machines under the swift, sure stroke of these skilled painters.

This is their sole occupation. Along a side-wall of the room moves slowly, on a ceiling-trolley, a long line of steel binders, all grimy from the hands of the men who join the different parts. In one corner is a tank of white paint, and by a system of pulleys each binder, as it passes, is lowered to the bath, completely immersed, and then drawn dripping back to the trolley. Presently it is lowered to a support, and is there allowed to dry. The stripers move down the lines, following close upon the drying of the paint, and the machines, soon ready for shipment from their hands, are transferred to the packing-rooms, the vacant places being quickly occupied by binders fresh from the bath. This is one phase of the endless chain of factory production under high division of labor.

Barry and I passed on through a communicating door to another room of about equal size and of equal light and airiness with the last. The temperate air was pungent with the smell of varnish and new paint. It passed with a pleasant sense of stinging freshness down into our lungs. We had reached our destination; for large sections of the room were closely stacked with tongues of various sizes, all standing on end in an ingenious system of grooves on the floor and ceiling. Some were newly come from the turning-mill; others had been painted, and now awaited varnishing; some had passed both of these processes, and were ready for the stripers; while in one corner stood those which had been painted and varnished and striped, and which were dry and ready to be taken to the platform, where Crist had ordered Barry and me to stack them.

Barry soon taught me how to load them properly, and, having filled the truck, we descended by an elevator to the ground-floor and passed out again into the bracing air of the open platforms, where we carefully stacked the tongues under the eaves, convenient to the loading of the cars. Round after round we made, going always and returning by the same course, loading the truck and stacking the tongues as quickly as we could. The work was not hard. There was a knack in the proper handling of the tongues, but it was readily acquired, and then one could settle down easily to the routine of work, whose monotony was broken by the recurring trips.

One incident checked us in the way. It was our happening to meet the timekeeper on his rounds. Barry dropped everything until he had made assurance doubly sure that his presence had been duly noted in the book. Seeing that I was a new hand the timekeeper quickly took my name, and then passed on with a parting word of caution to me about the proper record of my time.

Barry was evidently in high enjoyment of the situation. The work suited him, and the directing of a novice was hugely to his taste. There was little stay in the even current of his talk. I began to feel not unlike a “new boy” at school, for, with the air of a mentor, he pointed out to me all the sections of the factory, and the different occupations of the men, and the individual foremen as we chanced to see them. Once, as we were busily stacking tongues, his voice fell suddenly to a confidential tone, and his task was plied with tenser energy.

“Do you see that man talking to Crist?” he said to me, almost in a whisper, and with his eyes intent upon his work.

I had noticed someone who seemed to be a member of the managing staff.

“That’s Mr. Adams,” Barry continued. “He ain’t the head boss, but he’s next to the head. He’s an awful nice man. He was a workingman himself once. I’ve heard that he was a carpenter in the factory when the old man was alive, and that he was promoted to be next to the head boss. He knows what work is, and he’s awful nice to the men, but you don’t never want to let him catch you idle.”

We had just finished stacking the load and had started again for the warehouse, when we caught sight of a neatly dressed man of medium height who was crossing a temporary bridge, which joined the platform by the main building over the railway-track to the one where we were at work. I felt the truck shoot forward at a speed which I had to follow almost at a run. In the dark passage of the warehouse Barry was soon talking again, and again in an awed undertone.

“That was the head boss,” he said, impressively. “That was Mr. Young himself.” And he looked surprised that I did not stagger under the announcement, although, to do him justice, I did feel a good deal as the new boy might, brought unexpectedly for the first time into the presence of the head master.

“He ain’t never worked a day in his life,” Barry was continuing. “Only he’s a terrible fine superintendent. You bet he gets big wages. They say he can see when he ain’t looking, and he comes down like a thousand of brick on any man who shirks his work. He ain’t never worked himself, and so he don’t know what it is.”

The noon-whistle sounded soon after this, to my great relief, for a fast of eighteen hours was telling on me. Barry left the truck where it stood, and broke into a run. I followed him. In a moment the whole building and the outer platforms were echoing to the tread of running feet. When I reached the factory yard I found crowds of men streaming from every door and pressing swiftly through the gate. A stranger to the scene might at first sight have supposed the building to be on fire and that the men were escaping, but a second glance would have corrected the idea. There was no excitement in their mood; nor was there any playfulness; but with set, serious faces they were running for the careful economy of time. Barry had explained to me that, in order to quit the day’s work at half-past five, the hands take but half an hour for their mid-day meal, and that I must, therefore, be careful to be within the factory gates by half-past twelve.

Interesting as was the scene, I had no time to note it carefully, for I had caught the contagion of feverish hurry, and with the greater need on my part, for in that half hour I must get food if I was to return to work.

The situation was a little difficult. I had no money and no knowledge of any neighboring boarding-house. On the avenue, immediately opposite the wide entrance of the factory, was a line of cheap three-storied wooden tenements, the ground-floors occupied by saloons or shops, and the upper ones used evidently as the homes of factory-hands, for I could see the men entering the dark passages where narrow staircases connected the dwelling-rooms with the street.

Quite at random I walked into a barber-shop.

“Can you direct me to a boarding-house near by?” I asked the barber, who, dressed in soiled white, sat reading a newspaper beside the stove.

“Sure,” he said, obligingly, as he rose to his feet and came to the door and opened it. “You just go up them steps,” he added, pointing to the entry next door, “and you’ll find a lady that keeps boarders. Her name’s Mrs. Schulz. You tell her that I sent you.”

At the head of the landing I stood irresolute for a moment. It was dark after the unclouded mid-day. The light that entered came through the narrow opening of a door at the end of the passage, which stood ajar and which communicated with a front room, where there seemed to be a flood of sunlight. The prospect in the other direction was not so bright. I was beginning to see faintly, and could eventually make out the figures of a dozen or more workingmen, who sat about a table in a dim dining-room, eating hurriedly their dinner, with a noise of much clatter, and with bursts of loud talk and of hearty laughter. In a deeper recess, and through a short, dark, communicating passage, was a kitchen full of steam and the vapors of cooking food, through which came the light from the rear windows with the effect of shining vaguely through a fog.

Summoned, I know not how, Mrs. Schulz stepped out into the passage. I knew instantly that I should be provided for. I could not see her clearly, but her quiet, self-respecting manner was reassuring from the start.

“I’ve just got a job in the factory,” I explained at once. “Can you take me as a boarder?”

“I guess I can,” she answered, cordially. “Do you want your dinner?”

“Yes,” I said, and tried not to say it too eagerly.

“Then come right in. You haven’t any too much time,” she added, considerately.

At the vacant place which she indicated for me at the table I sat down between a workman of my own age and a hunchback operative who was probably ten years our senior.

“How are you?” said the first man, in the midst of the momentary lull which fell upon the room, while I passed my first inspection.

My reply was drowned for farther ears than his in the recurrent flow of talk about the table. The men had just finished their first course, but Mrs. Schulz brought in for me a plate of hot vegetable soup, steaming with a savoriness which was reviving in itself. My cordial neighbor dropped out of the general conversation and devoted himself to me. Nothing could have been more agreeable. He was as natural as a child, and genial to the point of readiest laughter. Like most of the other men, he sat coatless in his working-clothes, his face and hands black with the grime of the machine-shop where he worked, and his eyes shining with a light all the merrier for their dark setting.

A young American, a farmer’s son, he was recently come to Chicago from his home in central Iowa, and was making his way as a factory-hand and liked it greatly. His name was Albert. All of this information I gathered in barter for an equal share of my personal history, exchanged while we both ate heartily of a dinner of boiled meat and mashed potatoes, and stewed tomatoes and bread and coffee, and finally a slice of pumpkin pie, all of them excellent of their kind and most excellently cooked; and, although not neatly served, yet with as great a regard to neatness as the circumstances allowed.

My interest through the meal, aside from the food, was chiefly in Albert, but I caught, too, the drift of the general talk. It was directed at one Clarence, a fair-haired, fair-skinned, well-mannered youth who sat opposite us and at an end of the line. One noticed him immediately in the contrast which he made with the other men, for he was dressed in a “boiled” shirt and a collar, and he wore a neat black coat and a black cravat. It appeared that he had been promoted, on the day before, from a subordinate position in one of the machine-shops to the supervision of the tool-room of the factory. On this morning for the first time he had gone to work dressed, not in the usual blue jeans, but as one of the clerical force. The men were chaffing him on the change. Curiously enough, from their point of view, his working-days were over. There was no least disturbance in their personal attitude to the man nor in their feeling for him as a fellow. They recognized the change of status as a promotion, and you readily caught the note of sincere congratulation in their banter, and the boy bore his honors modestly and like a man. Yet it was a change of status most complete, for he had ceased to be a worker. To their way of thinking there may be forms of toil which are hard and even exhausting, but only that is “work” which brings your hands into immediate contact with the materials of production in their making from the raw or in their transportation. The principle is a broad one, incapable of application in full detail, but, as a principle, it figures in the minds of the workers as an unquestioned generalization that men work only with their hands and in forms of begriming labor.

Like Albert, Clarence, too, was an American, a youth from a village home in Ohio, and with the promise of a successful hazard of his fortunes in the city. I employ my versions of their Christian names because these were the only appellations in use about the table.

The meal was far too short for any general acquaintance among the men, and at its end we all hurried back to the factory. Barry was awaiting me beside the truck; as we began the rounds of the afternoon’s work he questioned me with interest about my success in getting a dinner. For another five continuous hours we carted tongues and stacked them.

The hands had been working by gas-light for nearly an hour when the time came for quitting the day’s labor. There was no rush now in leaving the factory. We crowded out through the gate, but under no high pressure, and the moving mass disintegrated and disappeared as magically as it had formed in the early morning. Beside the entrance idle men were again waiting, but their number was very few in contrast with the morning crowds, and their apparent purpose was a personal interview with the superintendent.

Mrs. Schulz’s boarders had soon reassembled, this time in her kitchen. Everything was in readiness for us. A row of tin basins stood in a long sink which extended under the rear windows nearly the length of the room; buckets of hot water were convenient, and at the pump at one end of the sink we could temper the water in the basins to our liking. Finally, there were cakes of soap cut from large bars, and the usual coarse towels hanging from rollers on the walls. With sleeves rolled up and our shirts wide open at the neck, we took our turns at the basins. It was interesting to watch the faces of the mechanics emerge from the washing in frequent changes of water to their natural flesh-color, in which the features could be clearly distinguished.

The few minutes during which we had to wait before the call to supper were spent in the front room, which was the sitting-room for the boarders and answered to the lobby in the logging-camp. Two windows looked out upon the street and commanded a farther view of the factory yard and buildings. The room was heated by a cylindrical iron stove, standing near the inner wall upon a disc of zinc, that served to protect a well-worn carpet with which the floor was covered. From a square wooden table in the centre a large oil-lamp flooded the room with light and brought out in startling vividness the pink rose-buds which in monotonous identity of design streaked the walls in long diagonal lines, broken only by an occasional chromo or a picture cut from an illustrated print. There was an abundant supply of wooden chairs, on which the men were seated, for the most part about the stove, and there was one large arm-chair on rockers, where sat Mr. Schulz with the next to the youngest child in his arms, an infant of between two and three. A girl of perhaps seven years, and a boy of nearly five, were playing together on the floor, and there was yet another child, for while we were washing in the kitchen I had heard the fretful cry of a baby from a dark chamber opening from that room.

Two of the men were intent upon the girl who lay in her father’s lap. They were rivals for her favor, and both were trying to coax her away. When she at last put out her arms to one of them, he tossed her toward the ceiling with a shout of glee at his triumph over the other man.

After supper we all regathered in the sitting-room. None of the men, so far as I could see, went out for the evening. Some of them read the newspapers of the day, and four had presently started a game of “High, Low, Jack,” at the table, with the result that most of the others were soon gathered about the players in excited interest, watching the varying fortunes of the game and giving vent to their feelings in boisterous outbursts.

I sat beside the fire talking to Mr. Schulz. There was inexpressible satisfaction in the feeling of _raison d’être_ which one had in being a worker with a steady job once more and a decent place in which to live. A boarding-house is not a synonym for home, and yet it may stir the domestic instincts deeply in the contrasts which it offers with the homeless life of the streets. The unquestioning hospitality with which I had been accepted as a guest was in keeping with the best of my experience so far. There was no suggestion of my paying anything in advance, though I had no security to offer beyond the fact that I was regularly employed in the factory and my promise to pay promptly out of the first instalment of my wages.

Mrs. Schulz had offered me board and lodging at four dollars a week, or at four dollars and a quarter if I wished a room to myself. It was the last bargain with which I closed when I was shown the only vacant room. It opened from the passage near the head of the landing and was perhaps seven feet by six. A single bed filled most of its area, and the rest was crowded with a chair and a small stand which supported an oil-lamp under a mirror on the wall. Some nails driven into the door and along the wall beside it, served the purpose of a closet. Light and air entered by a window which opened only a foot or two from a side-wall of the next building.

Cheerless as the room was and far from clean, it yet had about it all the essentials of privacy, and at a little past eight o’clock I went to bed with almost the sense of luxury after a fortnight’s experience of station-houses and cheap lodgings.

At six in the morning we were called by Mrs. Schulz, who had already been up for an hour or more preparing our breakfast, with the help of a hired girl. The men turned out sleepy and half-dressed into the kitchen to wash themselves, and then we sat down to a breakfast of “mush,” meat and potatoes, coffee and bread. The factory-bell was ringing by the time that we had finished, and there was a rush to get within the gate before the last taps marked the advent of seven o’clock.

The routine of factory work does not lend itself to varied narrative, and yet Barry’s work and mine was far from the monotony of much of the labor which we saw about us. There was a growing supply of tongues in the paint-shop, sufficient to keep us busy for several days, and while the work of loading and carting and stacking them was not hard in itself, ten hours of it daily was enough to send a man very hungry to his meals and thoroughly tired to his bed.

I was soon transferred from Crist’s department to one of the packing-rooms, where, through the remaining weeks of my service, I worked as a general utility man under the orders of a short, muscular foreman of singularly mild manner, who appeared to have scruples against swearing, but who was none the less vigilant and effective in his management. Most of the work of his department, as in all the departments of the factory, came under the piece-work system, and I was simply one of the two or three common laborers who, under his commands, attended to the odds and ends of jobs.

In one corner a man was packing boxes with the subordinate parts of mowers--a very interesting process, for the boxes were of such a size as to exactly hold all the loose parts when packed in a certain relation to one another, and the untiring swiftness with which the packer drew his supplies from their various bins and adjusted them in the box and nailed the lid upon them was fascinating in itself. I was sometimes employed in carting these boxes on a hand-truck, through a long run-way, to a warehouse and storing them there.

There were mowers to be shipped to foreign markets, and these had all to be done up in boxes. Three or four of us would be employed for days together in bringing the mowers up the run-way from the warehouse and further separating them into their parts and packing them in large boxes and nailing down the covers, upon which afterward appeared directions to distant ports, some to Russia, and others as far off even as Australian and New Zealand towns. A paint-shop was also connected with this department of the factory, where painting was done in the wholesale fashion employed for the binders, and from it I often carted the portions of the machines which were ready for the warehouse.

Some of the jobs held steadily for days together, and the foreman was never without work to give me. I could but feel a growing liking for him, for, although I was far from being an efficient workman, he was patient with my awkward efforts, and he accepted my mere dogged perseverance as evidence of a willingness on my part which reconciled him to me as a hand.

A like consideration had been shown me by the men at the boarding-house. They accepted me unhesitatingly as a workingman, but still I felt that I had my way to make among them, and very justly, for they were piece-workers all of them, earning fifteen dollars a week at the very least, some of them much more, while I was merely a common laborer at a dollar and a half a day. Their superiority to me was only the more apparent when there came among us, a few days after my arrival, a young Englishman from Jamaica, who had secured a job at common labor in the factory; for he, too, was far ahead of me, and it was not long before he was promoted to piece-work in one of the better-paid departments.

There was no discrimination against me. The men were perfectly friendly, but for the most part they had been associated for some time in their work and in their life in the boarding-house, and I was simply not of their set. The barriers which prevented entire freedom of intercourse were my own limitations and were never of their making, for they made the most generous advances when we had lived together for a time, and no doubt I could eventually have risen to be one of them on equal terms.

They were nearly all young Americans. Clarence and Albert were representative of the lot. Ned, the hunchback operative, was older than most of us, but he, too, was a native, of public-school education and decent antecedents, and he made a very good wage as a piece-worker in some department of the factory. Nothing that I saw among the men charmed me more than their treatment of Ned. He had an ungovernable temper and a crabbed, sullen disposition, which had been fostered by much suffering and an intense mortification due to his deformity, which he rarely forgot, apparently. At times he was as exasperating as a spoiled, petulant child, but the men endured him always with an evenness of buoyant good-humor so genuine that it never chafed him, and it sometimes transported him, in spite of himself, to a mood in sympathy with their own, in which he could be one of the best fellows of the lot.

It was not long before I knew that the man who was held in highest regard by the others was Dennis. The reasons for this did not appear at first. Dennis was of about the average age among us, a man of between twenty-five and thirty, an Irish-American of good appearance and a gentlemanlike reserve. The men looked up to him and paid a certain deference to his views in a way which puzzled me, for he never played the rôle of leader, being far less outspoken than some of the others, and moving among them always in a quiet, unassuming manner which laid no claim to distinction.

By chance I learned that he was the best-paid operative in the house, having a position of some importance in a machine-shop of the factory, and I noticed that he spent much of his leisure in the study of mechanical problems. He did not hold himself aloof from the evening game of cards, but he would quit it early and would soon be absorbed in his book in one corner of the room, where the noise seemed never to disturb him. Moreover, I came to realize that in certain important social matters Dennis was an authority. He would leave his work as black as the blackest man from the shops, but on Saturday afternoon, when we got off at five o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual, he would come out after supper ready for the evening’s gayety, dressed in what was unhesitatingly accepted as the height of the fashion. Saturday evenings were always devoted to pleasure, and none of the men was better informed than was Dennis as to the public balls which were available and which performance at the theatres (always spoken of as a “show”) was best worth a visit. As a workman of high grade and as a man of fashion and a social mentor with much occult knowledge of social form, he was yielded the first place. There was, moreover, a certain punctiliousness about him which only served to heighten his standing. It mattered not how late he had been out on Saturday night, I always found Dennis at his place for a seven o’clock breakfast on Sunday morning, and saw him start promptly for mass.

He was very evidently a favorite with Mrs. Schulz, and with small wonder, for he was always most considerately kind to her and to her children; but I thought that her liking for him grew quite as much out of her admiration for his strict regard to his church duties. She went to early mass herself, but she never failed to have breakfast ready for Dennis at exactly seven o’clock.

Mr. Schulz and she were devout Catholics, only I could but admire her devotion the more. It seemed to me to be put to so crucial a test. With but a raw Swedish girl to help her, she had the care of her five children besides all the cooking and other housework for a dozen boarders whose meals must be served on the minute. I am sure that I never saw her lose her temper, and I think that I never heard her complain, which is the greater wonder when one takes into account the fact that she was the sole bread-winner of the family. Mr. Schulz had had a job as a night watchman, but had lost it, and was now looking for work--not too conscientiously, I fear, for he impressed me as a weak man who found his wife’s support a welcome escape from a personal struggle for existence. He had, at least, the negative virtue of sobriety, and the positive one of loyalty to church duty, and in the house he perhaps could not have served his wife to better purpose than by taking care of the children as he did. He was certainly very proud of Mrs. Schulz. One day he confided to me the fact that she was a cook when he married her, and that in her day she had served in some of the palaces on Michigan Avenue. Such an experience explained the admirable cooking of the simple fare which she gave us, and the homelike management of her house; and her knowledge and skill in these domestic matters bore no small relation, I thought, to the spirit of contentment among the men, which held them to their quiet evenings in her sitting-room against the allurements of the town.

Her sheer physical endurance was a marvel. It was the unflinching courage of a brave soul, for she had little strength besides. Very tall and slight, emaciated almost to gauntness, she had a long, thin face with sunken cheeks and a dark complexion and jet-black hair, and round, soft, innocent eyes, which, matched with her indomitable spirit, were eloquent of the love which is “comrade to the lesser faith that sees the course of human things,” and seeing finds life worth living and is willing to endure.

The absence of self-consciousness from the members of this household lent a peculiar attractiveness to the life there. There was nothing morbid in their attitude to themselves nor in their relation to one another. Life was so obviously their master, and they so implicitly obedient to its control. You could lose in a measure the thought of self-directed effort to be something or do something, in the sense that you got of nearness to the spontaneity of primal force. Mrs. Schulz, for example, never impressed one as trying to exercise a certain influence in obedience to a volition formed upon a preconceived plan, but rather as being what she was as the expression of a life within and exercising an influence which was dominant by reason of its native virtue. And the men were never awkward and constrained in their courteous manner toward her, as they would have been had this been prompted by a sense of formal politeness, instead of being, as it was, their spontaneous tribute to her gentle ladyhood.

One wondered at first how such serenity would weather the storms. And when they came, the wonder grew at the further naturalness which they revealed.

Monday mornings were apt to be prolific of bad weather. The long, monotonous week loomed before us, and our nerves were unstrung with the violent reaction bred of over-indulgence in the freedom of a holiday. Our tempers, as a result, were all out of tune, and there was no merging of individuality in the harmony of a home. One was reminded of the discordant harping, each on its own string, of all the instruments of an orchestra before they blend melodiously in the accord of the overture. The hired girl, awkward and ungainly and dense, had neglected the mush and let it burn, and now with stupid vacancy in her dull eyes she moved about more in the way than of any service. The children, half-dressed in their pitiful, soiled garments, were sprawling underfoot, quarrelling among themselves and whimpering in their appeals for their mother’s intervention. Mrs. Schulz, at her wits’ end to get breakfast ready promptly, was bending over a stove whose fire smouldered and smoked and would not burn briskly in the raw east wind which was blowing down the chimney, and at the same time there grated on her ears the wails of the children and the ill-tempered complaints of the men and the stupid questions of the hired girl, and all the while her nerves were throbbing to the dull agony of a toothache. The men, roused from insufficient sleep, were crowding into the over-crowded kitchen, hectoring one another for their slowness at the basins; one loud in his complaint over the loss of some article of dress, another insistent in his demand for a turn at the mirror, and all of them perilously near the verge of a violent outbreak. There was much swearing of a very sincere kind and much plain speaking of personal views without circumlocution or reservation, but in the end the storm would spend its fury and pass. And the marvel of it was in the completeness of the clearing. The unrestrained vent of ill-temper would be followed by no harboring of malice. It was as though the men, who had freed themselves of a load of ill-feeling, were prepared to continue unhampered in the ease of agreeable association. The secret of it lay, I presume, in the absence of malignant antagonisms. The distempers were merely the results of the common attrition of life. At bottom these hard-working, self-respecting persons respected and liked one another, and in the intimacy of the crowded tenement they lived in relative comfort on no other possible terms than those of common liking and respect.

The factory itself further illustrated the periodic unevennesses of temper. Not that they were strictly periodic in the home. Mondays were apt to witness them, but there was no normal regularity in their occurrence, for they might crop out at any time. But Monday mornings in the factory were almost fatally sure of their emergence. You could not escape the feeling of unwonted disturbance both in the humor of the men and in the progress of their work. But nothing could have been more potent in coaxing them again into an accordant frame of mind than the routine of factory labor. The very doing of what had become to them a second nature by a quickness of hand which itself was a mark of mastery, seemed to win them back to cheerful acceptance of life. I have often seen the men at the boarding-house leave the breakfast-table in moods that “varied mostly for the worse,” and return to it at noon in high spirits that were finely attune.

There is a monotony about piece-work which must take on at times the quality of a maddening horror. I can bear no personal testimony to it, because I did not rise to the position of a piece-worker. The phases of the system which I saw, however, in the limited insight into its practical working to be gained in my range in the factory as a common laborer, impressed me rather with its advantages. Among the day-laborers here there was apparent at once the same deadly uninterest in their work which is characteristic of their class in the present ordering of such labor. The attitude is that of irresponsible school-boys in their feeling of natural hostility to their masters in the mutual struggle over the prescribed tasks. But among the laborers it takes on the tragedy of the relation of grown men to the serious business of their lives. Interest in their work? Not the faintest. Sense of responsibility for it? Not the dimmest. Any day you could see the bearded father of a family shirk his task in a momentary absence of the boss, or steal truant minutes from his time in idling on an errand, with as puerile a spirit as that which prompts a stroke of mischief in school-hours.

The piece-system lifts the labor instantly from this plane to one where the motive of self-interest conspicuously enters. A man is insured from the first of at least the wage of day’s labor; his own industry and deftness are then the factors in determining his earnings up to a certain limit. For I soon found that a hand was not free to employ his utmost skill when he became an expert. There seemed to be a tacit agreement in each department of the factory as to what should constitute the maximum of day’s labor. Below that a man might fall if he chose, but beyond it he was not at liberty to go. And the reason was very obvious. Even a few men in continually passing, by any considerable margin, the accepted daily average would inevitably produce the result of a cut in the _pro rata_ price until wages were down again to the accustomed level. The system gives a man an incentive to work and to develop his skill, but, in its practical operation, it holds him rigorously to the level of mediocre attainment.

Barry incidentally pointed this out to me with striking clearness one day while we were carting tongues. Two of the varnishers were missing from the paint-shop when we went up for our first loads. Barry remarked on their absence, with the comment that they were certain to be on hand at half-past nine o’clock.

It appears that if an employee misses the open factory-gate in the early morning by ever so little, he may not enter then until the end of two hours and a half, which marks the close of the first quarter of the day’s work.

True to Barry’s prediction, we presently found both varnishers at their places, and when, in the late afternoon, he asked them, with the frankness of working-people in such matters, as to how much they had done, he again found himself verified, since each had achieved the prescribed amount, and so had earned full pay. They had simply worked at a greater speed than usual; and they might, so far as the time was concerned, have accomplished this every day, except that a man would soon gain a bad name by being habitually late, and his promptness at seven o’clock would be quickly insured by a cut in the rate paid for his form of labor.

It was a very limited view of the factory as a whole that I could get from the post of an unskilled worker in one of its departments, but what growing familiarity was possible served to increase the sense of wonder at the possibilities of such highly organized methods of production.

There were the great, substantial buildings themselves with their ingenious adjustments of parts, so related as to facilitate to the utmost the processes of manufacture and shipment at the lowest cost and with the least friction. There were the lines of railway which entered the grounds, by means of which the machines, loaded into cars from the platforms of the factory, could be forwarded without change to every quarter of the continent. All needed materials, to the smallest detail, entered the factory in their raw forms, and passed out as finished product, delicately adjusted machines ready for immediate use. The imagination bounds to the conception of the miraculous ingenuity of instruments, and the trained skill of operatives, and the shrewd co-ordination of labor, and, above all, the marvellous captaincy by which all this differentiation is systematized and is ordered and directed to the effective achievement of its ends.

The large, well-ventilated rooms, comfortably warmed in winter and admirably supplied with the means of light and air, are a part of the general efficacy of the system, and the untiring dexterity of the men gives to it its strongly human interest. There is a fascination in their movements which determines the quality of the attractiveness of the whole. You see no feverish haste in the speed with which they work, but rather the even, smooth, unfaltering sureness which is the charm of mastery, and which must be attended by its satisfaction as well.

I witnessed this with delight among the men with whom I lived. Conversation at our meals was nearly always of shop; at dinner and supper especially we discussed the details of the day’s work. Several of us were employed at constructing binders. Albert was of that number. He was making but little more than the wage of common labor when I first knew him, but his income began to increase with his increasing efficiency, and it was a matter of great, vital interest to us all to hear his reports each day, as he told of a fraction of a binder and then of a whole one in advance upon his previous work, until his daily earnings rose to two dollars and a half, which was accepted in his department as the normal sum.

Besides these elements of personal interest in piece-work as a scheme of labor and the gratification of the sense of effective workmanship, there entered here the stimulus of ambition based upon excellent chances of promotion. The factory system of production creates strong demand for manual skill, and stronger still for the capacity of administration and control. Why the realization of these facts did not possess more thoroughly the minds of the common laborers, I could not understand. They were strangely impervious to their force, for nothing could have been more noticeable than the alertness of the managing staff in watching for evidences of unusual ability among the men. It was not at all uncommon for a hand who had been taken on as a day-laborer to be promoted, as a result of his intelligence and industry, to some department of piece-work. Nearly every foreman in the factory is said to have begun far down the scale, and Barry’s account of the career of the assistant manager I have heard confirmed.

During my short stay I was actually witness to the progress of two men who came in as day-laborers, the young Englishman from Jamaica and a stalwart, handsome Swede who secured a job and joined us at the boarding-house about a fortnight ago. Clarence earned a promotion and got it at the time of my coming to the factory, and I have seen Albert’s rise from a position removed by very little from that of unskilled labor to that of a workman whose skill commands the sum of fifteen dollars a week. Dennis is a type of craftsman whose future it is not difficult to predict. Conscientious and industrious and persevering, endowed with rare ability and real capacity for work, his progress seems assured, and a well-paid, authoritative position an ultimate logical certainty.

All these are of the best class of factory-workers that I came to know. There are other classes quite as clearly defined, and most of them have their representatives about our table. Men, for example, who have an honest interest in their work as such, and who have risen by force of ambition and sheer development of manual skill to good positions in the factory, and have there stood still, their congenital qualities incapable, presumably, of higher efficiency. But sadder far than theirs is the case of men who are often best endowed with native cleverness and aptitude, who rise quickly in the scale of promotion, and who might rise far higher than they do but for the curse of their careless living. They know no interest in their work nor pleasure in its doing. To them it is the sordid drudgery by which they gain the means of gratifying their real purposes and desires. With sullen perseverance they endure the torment of labor, with pay-day in view and then Saturday night and Sunday with their mad revels in what they call life. The future is a meaningless word, with no claim upon them beyond the prospect that it holds of more indulgence; the present is their sole concern, and only with reference to what it can be made to yield to ruling passions.

From some phase of this last attitude to life none of the men whom I knew personally seemed to be entirely free. There is no improvidence like the improvidence of the poor. Doubtless there is no thrift like theirs, but among these young men, with all of life before them, their reckless prodigality in money-matters assumed at times an appalling nature. Some of them made no pretence of saving anything, and the few who did save would show at times an audacity of extravagance to match with the wastefulness of the worst. They were not a drinking set in any sense of excessive indulgence, for not one of them had the reputation of a drunkard, and their spending was much of it in comparatively innocent channels, but it was monstrous in relation to their means and to their prospects in the world.

A perfectly well-recognized philosophy justified it to their minds.

“We’ll never be young but once,” they would say, “and if we don’t have a good time now, we never will.”

A good time was often secured at enormous cost. I do not know whether it is the habitual dissipation, or whether it happens to be the vogue for this winter, but it is very certain that to the men here the fancy-dress ball is now the incomparable attraction. One or more such functions within their range falls on nearly every Saturday night. They are given for the most part by certain “Brotherhoods” and labor organizations, and they are free, apparently, to all who come dressed in a manner sufficiently “fancy” to meet the views of “the committee,” and pay the price of a ticket, which admits “self and lady.”

As the men saw the night approaching, their talk would turn more and more to the absorbing subjects of costume and the girls whom they meant to take with them. There are shops which do business at letting out ready-made disguises for such occasions, and I have repeatedly seen these hard-working industrious fellows go deep into their pockets, to the extent even of half a week’s pay, for the use for a few hours of some tawdry make-up of velvet and spangles and lace, which reeked with promiscuous wear. And the outlay did not end with dress, for there remained tickets of admission, and the cost of at least two suppers for each and of not a little drinking. It was exceptional for any one of them to come home drunk, and the man who did was sure of a course of steady bantering for days, but some drinking was the rule for the Saturday nights that were given to masquerade. When a play would fall in place in the order of amusement, the men were sure to return by midnight, and there was always then less evidence of drink.

All forms of public gayety seemed scrupulously confined to Saturday nights and Sundays. The men could not have been more punctual at their work, and the habitual week-day evening was the far from exciting one in Mrs. Schulz’s sitting-room, which I have described. There they regularly gathered after supper, and smoked, and romped with the children, and played cards, and read. I was usually off for bed by eight o’clock, for nothing less than ten hours of sleep would fit me for the ten hours of labor in the factory, and the others would follow an hour or two later.

The morning brought the unwelcome summons to get up in what seemed the dead of night and but an hour or two after the time of going to bed. Cold water would have its rousing effect, as, also, a breakfast by lamplight with an anxious eye on the clock, and then a rush through the sharp air of the morning twilight until you were caught in the living stream which poured through the factory-gate. Work was begun on the minute, and your ear caught the sharp metallic clink of the mowers as the workmen pushed the frames down the loading-platforms to the cars. Even within the brick enclosures and in the stinging cold of the winter air, there arose inevitably with the sound the association of meadows fragrant with the perfume of new-mown timothy and clover drying in the hazy warmth of a long summer afternoon.

Within the buildings, almost in a moment, would rise the turmoil of production. You heard the deafening uproar of far-reaching machinery, as, with wheels whirling in dizzy motion and the straps humming in their flight, it beat time in deep, low throbs to the remorseless measures of a tireless energy. Cleaving the tumult of the sounding air you heard at frequent intervals the buzz-saws as they bit hard with flying teeth into multiple layers of wood, rising to piercing crescendo and then dying away in a sob. There was the din of many hammers, and over the wooden floors and along the run-ways, and through the dark, damp passages of the warehouses, and down the deep vistas of the covered platforms, was the almost constant rumble of hand-trucks pushed by men and boys.

All this unceasingly for five continuous hours, which always seem unending, and then the abrupt signal for twelve o’clock, and the sound of the machinery running down while the men are hastening to their mid-day meal. About the factory-gate are always at this hour groups of women and young children who have brought in pails and baskets hot dinners for their men. On brighter days you can see long lines of operatives sitting along the curbs or with their backs against the high board fence, basking in the sunlight, as they eat their dinners in the open air and converse among themselves and with their wives or children.

Then back to your place in the afternoon while the machinery is slowly working up to its accustomed pace and the men about you reassembling to take up again, on the stroke of the hour, the work of the afternoon. Five more hours of the thundering rush of factory labor follow, and you leave the gate at night almost too tired to walk. A wash is first in your recovery, and it rests you more than would sleep. Then supper brings its deep satisfaction and a smoke its peaceful content, and you go to bed better off by a day’s wages.