CHAPTER VI

A ROAD BUILDER ON THE WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS

COLUMBIAN ANNIVERSARY HOTEL--No. 1., CHICAGO, ILL., Wednesday, April 27, 1892.

From the time that I began work on the Exposition grounds, early in this month, it has grown increasingly difficult to hark back in imagination to the unemployed _régime_ of the winter. The change is a revolution of condition. Hundreds of us live all together within this vast enclosure, and have rare occasion to go out except on Sundays, and then only if we choose. We get up in the morning to an eight-hour day of wholesome labor in the open air, and return in the late afternoon with healthy appetites to our temporary “hotel,” which is fragrant of clean, raw pine, and stands commandingly on the site of the future “court of honor” near the quiet waters of the lake. About four hundred of us are housed and fed in this one building; men of half a score of nationalities and of as many trades, ranging from expert carpenters and joiners and staff-moulders and steel-workers to the unskilled laborers who work in gangs, under the direction of the landscape-gardeners or, as in my case, on the temporary plank roads which are built for the heavy carting.

Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in a marvellous artificial world. No sight of misery disturbs us, nor of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment. Work is everywhere abundant and well paid and directed with highest skill. And here, amid delicate, web-like frames of steel which are being clothed upon with forms of exquisite beauty, and among broad, dreary wastes of arid dunes and marshy pools which are being transformed by our labor into gardens of flowers and velvet lawns joined by graceful bridges over wide lagoons, we work our eight hours a day in peaceful security and in absolute confidence of our pay.

Complete as the revolution is, it is yet in perfect keeping, in some strange way, with the general change wrought by the coming of the spring. This spring, in its effect upon the labor market in Chicago, was like the heralding of peace and plenty after war.

There was no longer any real difficulty in securing work. The employment bureaus offered it in abundance in the country, and there was some revival of demand even within the city limits. This by no means solved the problem of the unemployed, however. Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men off because of physical incapacity. One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I overheard, early one morning, at a factory-gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to support. He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater’s den, barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.

The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck evidently by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and of his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white, transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal men can feel and no mortal tongue can speak.

Other men there were in large numbers who during the winter had swelled the ranks of the unemployed, but who now, in the reviving warmth and the growing demand for labor, drifted out upon the open country to their congenial life of vagrancy. There still remained, however, and apparently in full force, the shrewd gentry who stop pedestrians on the street with apologetic explanations of hard luck and with begging appeals for a small sum wherewith to satisfy immediate wants. Clark and I had soon come to know this as a recognized occupation among the men with whom we were thrown. A highly profitable trade it often proved, for a dollar a day is a gleaning not at all uncommon to these men, and the more skilful among them can average a dollar and a half. They are rather the sporting spirits among the professionally idle; gambling is their chief diversion, and their contempt for honest work is as genuine as that of a snob.

But within this chaotic maelstrom of the unemployed, which in every industrial centre seethes with infinite menace to social safety, is always a large element which is not easily classified. It was still to be found on the streets and in the lodging-houses of Chicago when the winter was gone, in seemingly undiminished numbers and in much its accustomed thriftlessness. The class has to be defined in negative terms. The men are not physically incapable of work, nor are they habitual tramps, nor yet the beggars of the pavements, and they lack utterly the grit for crime. If they have a distinctive, positive characteristic as a class, it is that they are victims of the gregarious instinct. By an attraction which is apparently irresistible to them, they are drawn to congested labor markets, and there they cling, preferring instinctively a life of want and squalor in fellowship with their kind to one of comparative plenty in the intolerable loneliness of the country.

There is a semblance of sincerity in their search for work, but they are cursed with the rudiments of imagination which makes cowards of them all, and their incapacity is a weakness of will rather than of brawn. Shrinkingly they walk the narrow ledge which in many planes of life separates from tramphood and crime, while lacking the wit for the latter and the courage for both lives, and looking ever for something to turn up instead of resolutely turning something up. Civilization is hard on such men, and their sufferings are none the less real because chiefly due to their incapacity for the struggle for existence. And not only their own misery must be reckoned with in any fair estimate of the case, but far more the misery of their women and children, for these men are proletarians in the literalest meaning of the word.

Finding now that I could not only get work, but that I could actually be eclectic in the matter, I gladly took advantage of an opportunity of employment among the unskilled laborers on the Exposition grounds.

A sharp-eyed, energetic American, who superintends the gangs of unskilled laborers, took me on, and at once assigned me to duty under an Irish sub-boss by the name of O’Shea. When I became one of its number, Mr. O’Shea’s gang of eight or ten men had torn up a considerable section of the plank road near the Transportation Building, for the purpose of altering the level. Most of us were put in charge of wheel-barrows. These we filled with sand at a neighboring pile and then emptied it in heaps on the road-bed, while the remaining members of the gang spread the sand with shovels to the desired depth before replacing the planks. It was a cloudy morning early in April, with a cold, raw wind blowing in from the lake, and the work, not very fatiguing in itself, kept one comfortably warm until noon. We had a free hour for dinner then, and I simply accompanied the other gang-men to “Hotel No. 1,” where my employment ticket, issued by the general superintendent of construction, procured for me without delay a meal-and-lodging ticket on trust.

A large, zinc-lined trough half full of water stood against the wall in an ante-chamber. Here men by the score were washing their hands and faces and drying them near by on roller towels. They then passed singly through the wicket at the dining-room door, where stood a man who punched each boarder’s ticket as he entered.

Long wooden tables, heaped with dishes and lined with round-bottom stools, ran the great length of the room. The men took places in the order of their coming, until they had filled one table, when they would begin upon another, and there arose a deafening clatter of knives and forks and dishes and a tumult of mingled speech.

That dinner serves as a good illustration of our fare, both in what it offered and in what it lacked. A bowl of hot soup was at each man’s place when he sat down, and, after finishing this, he was given a choice between roast beef and Irish stew. There were potatoes boiled in their jackets, and pork-and-beans, and bread in wide variety and in enormous quantity, and a choice of tea or coffee, and finally a pudding for dessert. Some of this was good, but all of it smacked of wholesale preparation, and appetites nicer than those of workingmen would have found difficulties with the dinner. Even ours were not proof against it all. I was struggling with a slice of tough roast beef out of which the virtue had been cooked, when suddenly I caught an expression of comical dismay stealing over the ruddy, bristling face of the man opposite me. He was eating a piece of meat from a plate of Irish stew, and he spat it out upon the floor with a deep-drawn oath, and a frank assurance to his neighbors that “the meat was rotten,” while his facial muscles were contorted with strong disgust. And the pudding was of such uncertain nature as to recall vividly the oft-repeated saying of a classmate at a college eating-club, that “flies in a pudding are quite as good as currants.” Still the pork-and-beans were excellent and the bread and potatoes fine, and the coffee, which was served in large cups with the roast, was not impossible; certainly it was a well-fed crowd which sat smoking for a quarter of an hour or more on the rough embankments overlooking the Agricultural Building before going back to work.

Our gang was divided in the afternoon, and Mr. O’Shea left three of us, a German, an Irishman, and me, to open up a way for the teamsters through two long piles of paving-stones, which obstructed the road near the Fisheries Building. His parting word to us was that the stint was an afternoon’s job, and we could easily have finished it in the four hours from one o’clock until five, had we worked with moderate swiftness.

The German and the Irishman fell to lifting stones to one side of the desired opening and I to the other. Every condition favored us. We had a definite task and not a difficult one, and no one to watch us at our work, nor drive us in its doing. The clouds had disappeared, and in the soft spring sunshine, with the bushes blossoming about us and the air full of the sounds of multiform labor, there was every stimulus to energetic effort for four hours. Not that the hours seemed short--they never do, I am convinced, even to well-seasoned unskilled workmen--but the difference between four hours of manual labor at a stretch and five is enormous, and to see my _confrères_ quite as impatient of their flight, even under these most favoring conditions, and to mark that the sober business of their lives was still an abhorrent drudgery to be shirked if possible, led the way to very sad reflection.

Neither of them paid any attention to me until, late in the afternoon, there came a lull in their talk and I heard the Irishman’s call.

“Hey, John!”

“Hello,” I said.

“Was you going to shave off them whiskers for Easter?”

I told him that I had not thought of it.

“Well,” he went on, “I hear the boys as have whiskers say as how they must go on Easter morning, and I thought maybe it was the same wid you.”

“What are you after doing, getting yourself into a sweat?” he continued, for he had drawn off from the German and was making my way. “You be a fool to kill yourself; you don’t earn the more by it, and they don’t think any the better of you. Take it easy, man, take it easy; there’s time enough.”

He was an authority on the time, for every few minutes he would walk slowly over to where his coat and waistcoat lay on a heap of stones, and drawing out a great silver watch, would critically examine it, and then announce the hour in a loud call to the German and me. At a quarter to five the two picked up their coats and went off, dodging behind shrubs and piles of building materials, until they made their exit at the gate, leaving a good third of the job unfinished.

That was on a Saturday. On Monday morning Mr. O’Shea singled out us three for as stiff a cursing as a boat’s crew often gets, but to little purpose, apparently, in its effect upon the other men. On that very day I was again a member of a gang, a gang of four this time, which was left without an overseer. We were ordered to unload a car of timber and pile the boards near the mammoth framework on the east side of the Manufactures Building. Besides native inertia there was unusual cause for idling in the fact that one of our number, a young Englishman, Rosedale by name, proved to be uncommonly interesting. He was rather a trim fellow, of the adventurous, jack-of-all-trades kind, that roam the world widely, and that always appear in numbers at great celebrations and in new regions. How they live and secure the means of extensive travel is a secret which no member of the fraternity ever tells. There was no mystery about Rosedale just then, for he was a fellow-lodger in Hotel No. 1, and was No. ---- in the gang of laborers in which I, for example, was No. 472, and he fell into as natural association with the men as though he had lived with us always.

He was just up from South Africa, where he had been in the diamond fields, he said. Seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds was the loot he was bringing with him to Canada, when he was shipwrecked off the coast of Labrador and escaped with only his life. Not one of us, I suppose, was anything but sceptical of much of Rosedale’s story, but the man told his tale of free, reckless, vicious living on the diamond fields, with a vividness of narrative and a rough wealth of local color that charmed us into most attentive listeners, and that sped the morning hours with little regard to our job. Questions began to crowd in upon Rosedale as to the location of South Africa and the means of getting there, and great disappointment was evident in the discovery that it was not contiguous to any familiar point.

Noon found us with a pitiful showing for the morning’s work. In the afternoon I secured the post inside the car, and passed the boards out to the three other men, who piled them near the building. By hastening the work at that end, I hoped to quicken the pace at which the job was being done. To be caught a second time in a delinquent gang I feared would endanger my position, and I was anxious to remain on the grounds, and even more anxious to secure a promotion if I could. It was easy to keep ahead of the men, but it was impossible, apparently, to urge them beyond the languid deliberation with which they shouldered the timber and carried it to the piles.

“Let up on that, John,” they were shouting at me presently. “Go easy with that; there ain’t no rush, and you’ll make nothing by your pains.”

It was the view which I had heard again and again in gangs of unskilled laborers. One could understand it in a measure among the older men, who could hope at the best only to eke out an existence free from the poor-house to the end. But these and many others from whom it came were relatively young men, with every chance, one would suppose, of winning some preferment through effective, energetic work.

At five o’clock, the end of the afternoon’s labor, we had an hour in which to make leisurely preparation for a supper which consisted of cold meats in unstinted plenty, and potatoes, and bread, and tea and coffee, and often some stewed fruit with a little cake. After this most of the men loafed in the lobby until bedtime. This sitting-room includes the entire upper floor of a large wing of the building. An enormous base-burner heats it, and serves to render it stifling in the evening, when the men are smoking with every window closed. Games and newspapers strew the tables, and the room is well lighted with electric lamps.

On the same level is the upper section of the main building, where are the sleeping-quarters for the men. The provision here is similar in design to that of a cheap lodging-house; only this is almost immaculate in its cleanliness, and the cabins are large and well ventilated, and the ceilings high and airy, and the berths are supplied with new wire and clean corn-husk mattresses, and with sheets and pillow-cases fragrant from the wash.

Mine is a middle, lower berth in a cabin for six men, but it lodges at present only two besides myself.

In a bunk nearest the door sleeps an Irishman, whose acquaintance I made while getting ready for bed on the first night of my stay. Opening the door that evening and seeing me seated in the middle bunk, he stood eyeing me for a time with obvious displeasure. He was evidently not in the best of humors, and although but two of the six berths in the large cabin were occupied, he plainly regarded my coming as an intrusion. Neatly dressed in dark blue, and with an old felt hat on the back of his head, he cut a fine figure of a workman as he stood in the open door, a man of five-and-thirty, with a massive frame bent slightly forward and with a frown wrinkling the low forehead, from which the thick hair grew in tawny masses.

“Who let you in here?” was his first remark.

“The proprietor,” I answered.

“Did he say you could have that bunk?”

“Yes.”

“Well, ---- it, is he going to flood the place?”

I knew no answer to that question, and so I ventured to ask after the occupant of the bunk nearest the window.

“He’s an Englishman; works in the landscape gang wid me,” replied the Irishman, laconically.

By this time he had seated himself on his bed with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed with an air of weariness. The change of subject had, fortunately, been effective, for he no longer objected to my presence, and for some time he sat talking freely in a droning, disjointed way.

I gathered that he was thoroughly dissatisfied with his work and wages and his boarding-place and with life in general. He did not enter into details of his personal history; his mood spent itself in anathemas against his present lot: “Work, ceaseless, unprofitable, joyless work. Eat and work; eat more and work; eat again and sleep and eat and work. This and nothing more; body and soul sold at a dollar and a half a day. And nothing else to look forward to, with chances only of a steadily hardening lot, throughout the on-coming of old age to death.”

I had never heard a workman in pessimistic mood so coherent, and I felt sure that the Irishman was ill; for commonly with our class, a full meal and a pipeful at the end of a day’s labor are enough to banish care and to tinge living with a glow of satisfaction. The suspicion proved true enough, for the man soon began to shake with a malarial chill in our cheerless barrack, and he told me that the ague laid hold of him regularly on alternate days.

It was the loneliness of the fellow that impressed one as he lay shivering in his bunk. There were hundreds of men in the house, but not one of them was charged with any responsibility for him, and there was no provision for illness. On his bad days he would force himself through the usual routine, but, when the day was done, there was nothing for him but to lie in lonely misery in his bed. Not that he whined in the least. I gathered these facts by inference. It was the barrenness of his life that he cursed, not its hardness, for this he accepted as a matter of course.

And yet one could not fail to see where finer feeling inflicted a sharper pain in his suffering. I had marked at once the neatness of his dress, and especially the cleanliness of person by which one distinguishes instantly between a workman and a tramp.

There are interesting degrees of cleanness in workingmen. One sees it at its best, I think, among those of the building trades. The stains of their labor are clean in themselves, and the men partake of the wholesomeness of their employment. The workers at rougher jobs must show the marks of soiling labor, but there is infinite difference between the earth stains of a common laborer and the ingrained, begrimed uncleanness of an unwashed vagrant. Having in the house, however, so many men, and just at the end of the long period of unemployment, it is inevitable, perhaps, that there should be a few of the number whose status as between workingmen and tramps is not clearly defined. And some of the consequences are unpleasant.

It was this that the Irishman had in mind as he looked me over critically and was somewhat slow in welcoming me to the cabin.

The same concern showed itself again when he presently told me that the Englishman and he always made up their berths themselves, instead of leaving them for the regular bed-makers, who might communicate vermin from other bunks. The hint was sufficient, and I hastened to set his mind at rest by assuring him that I heartily endorsed the plan and would follow it faithfully.

The Englishman I did not see until the next morning. Upon getting up to the six o’clock call, I found that he had turned in without waking me. We sprang out of bed at the same moment, and almost at a glance I knew him for the ex-Tommy Atkins that he is. I shall call him Brown. A wooden chest, studded with brass nails and made fast with a heavy padlock, stood near the foot of his berth. On it lay his working clothes, not thrown down in confusion, but neatly folded and lying in the order of dress. He himself was as trim and straight and as clean as a sapling, and when he returned from his wash he fairly sparkled with the afterglow. Back went the sheets with a single movement of his hand the moment that he was dressed, and over went the mattress, and the pillows began rollicking in the shaking which he gave them. In marvellously short time the bed was remade and the sheets turned back over the foot of the bunk to admit of proper airing.

We have been thrown together by reason of the fact that neither of us is proof against the lobby for long in the evening. It is usually dark by the time I have finished supper, and I go first of all to the sitting-room. It is ablaze with light, and the huge stove is going under full head and all the windows are closed and some scores of men are smoking old pipes. I have known nights when such a place would have been a most welcome escape from exposure, but having now a choice it is never long before I leave the lobby for the cabin. Here I generally find Brown seated on the box at the foot of his berth, playing an old fife which is singularly pliant to his touch. Throwing myself in my bunk I have lain there by the hour together listening to his music and watching him as he beat time to the “British Grenadiers” and the “Blue Bells of Scotland,” and to tunes of no end of barrack-room ballads, wondering the while what vision it was of India or of Burmah, perhaps, or of the Soudan, or possibly of the Afghan frontier that brought that look of longing to his eyes.

He is the soul of soldier-like precision; he never misses a day at work except the one which immediately follows pay-day, and that because he never misses his spree. The Irishman and I have come to count with perfect regularity upon Brown’s not turning up on the evening when he is paid. About three or four o’clock on the next morning we hear him open the cabin door softly, and, supporting himself with a hand on the upper berths, move slowly across the floor until he has reached his bed, where he throws himself on his face as he is and sleeps for twenty-four hours.

I was not long a member of Mr. O’Shea’s gang, for at the end of the first week another laborer and I were singled out for special duty on the roads. But on Wednesday afternoon of that week two men joined the force of unskilled laborers who filled us all with curious interest. There is another gang of about the same number as Mr. O’Shea’s, with which we are often thrown in our work and which is under the command of a Mr. Russell.

At one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon I went as usual to report with the other men at the superintendent’s office where we receive our orders. Mr. Dutton, the superintendent, always comes out and looks us over and consults for a few minutes with the sub-bosses, and then orders the various gangs to different sections of the grounds.

Two young men were standing near his office-door on that Wednesday afternoon when I came up at a few minutes before one. I did not give them a second glance at first, for I took for granted that they were tourists who had entered the grounds by special permission and were now waiting for a guide. But in another moment I happened to see Mr. Dutton’s clerk beckon them within the office where he took their names and gave to each a metallic disk upon which a number was stamped. Then they came out again and, taking off their coats, stepped in among the gathering company of workmen and waited to be assigned.

By this time we were all staring at them agape, but they stood the ordeal with a frank unconsciousness which filled me with admiration. They were about of age, two clean-cut, well-groomed, clear-eyed English boys, who looked as though they might be public-school bred, and I noticed that their coats bore the name of a London tailor. One, a brown-haired lad, with large, sober, brown eyes and a manner of considerable reserve, was exceedingly good-looking, and the other, a fair-haired, fair-skinned, alert-looking boy, plainly the spokesman for the two, had a face of unusually fine drawing.

Mr. Dutton hesitated a moment in their case, but finally ordered them to join Mr. Russell’s gang, and in a few minutes we were widely separated. Repeatedly in the early afternoon I found myself thinking about them and wondering why it was that they must earn their bread by unskilled labor. Two hours of the afternoon remained when there came an order from Mr. Dutton to our gang to repair to the Transportation Building. We found, upon getting there, that we had been summoned to reinforce Mr. Russell’s men, who were unloading from a car two large steam-rollers. Again I saw the young Englishmen, and I had a chance to watch them at work.

By this time the gang-men had sated their curiosity in staring, and now ignored the lads as being anything but laborers with themselves, which was much the best-bred thing that they could have done.

As a preliminary to unloading, we had to carry to the car some heavy wooden blocks to serve as supports to an inclined plane by which the machines could be slid to the ground. It sometimes required four and even six men together to lift these blocks, and repeatedly I found myself next in line to the new-comers. Their linen collars were wilting with the sweat of labor, and it had apparently not occurred to them to take them off. Their shirts, of delicate color, were turned up above their elbows with gold link-buttons dangling from the cuffs. The rough wood was fretting their bare white arms cruelly. I had a chance presently to speak to one of them, and I showed him how he could get a hold which would not be so chafing. In a moment of leisure he came up and thanked me frankly, and volunteered the information that his friend and he were but a week over from England and, having failed utterly to find other work in Chicago where they had supposed that employment was plentiful, they were glad enough in an extremity to accept this means of living.

Most pluckily have they stuck at it. I have never again been associated with them in a job, but, I see them almost every day, and through rain and shine they have been the steadiest members of their gang. Places better suited to them will be found, no doubt, as the general work progresses; and that will not be long, I hope, for just now the boys are at a considerable disadvantage. It was only two or three mornings ago that I happened to meet them again near Mr. Dutton’s office, where they had been sent to fetch some tools. The fairer boy wore a bandage which covered his left forearm and most of the hand. I asked him what had happened, and he explained to me how that in handling some old sleepers he had missed his hold in one case, and, with the fall of the heavy timber, a rusty iron nail tore down through his arm and the palm of his hand, leaving a ragged wound open nearly to the bone. He had had it dressed promptly by a good surgeon, who reassured him as to danger of complications. But it had taken all his companion’s savings and his own to pay the original fee, and they were in arrears for the daily dressing. Luckily, however, he was still able to work, and Mr. Russell kept him employed, he told me, in ways which brought his injured arm very little into play.

Those of us who belong permanently to gangs such as Mr. O’Shea’s and Mr. Russell’s are known as “regulars,” to distinguish us from the hands who are taken on, a day at a time, for some particular need. Quite the most efficient “regular” in my gang is a certain Henry Jerkener, who is that rare exception, so far as my experience goes, a native American in a company of unskilled laborers. “Harry,” as he is called, and I were early assigned to special duty. Mr. Dutton beckoned us aside one afternoon and ordered us to report to him at ten o’clock the next morning, telling us that our day, beginning henceforth at ten, would last until seven in the evening instead of five o’clock. And our wages would be raised from $1.50 to $1.75 a day.

Our work was to be the general care of all the plank roads on the grounds. They had been put in fairly good condition, but they received hard usage, and constant repairs were necessary. We were, therefore, to give our attention, up to five o’clock in the afternoon, to particular sections of the road which were most in need of mending, and after five, when the work for the day had ceased, our duty was to go over all the roads and see that they were in condition for the beginning of the carting in the morning.

Harry appeared delighted with the arrangement. Not that he took any special stock in me as an assistant, but because, however indifferent a workman, at least I was an American, and he would be free of the gang of Irish regulars and himself in charge of the work, instead of being under the orders of Mr. O’Shea.

Harry’s good-humor is proof against anything, apparently, his temperament being that of a sunny May morning. But if there is anything which bores him, it is to be ordered about by an Irish sub-boss.

I did not discover this until after we had left the gang. So long as he was one of their number he was the life of the crew, jolly, high-spirited, with a ready flow of banter that was never delicate and never ill-tempered, always foremost in the work, having at command a fund of resourceful ingenuity which made him the real leader and director of the men while the boss looked on in silence. But after we had been assigned to special duty he bloomed into new jollity, which is at its best whenever in our work we heave in sight of the old gang. It is deliciously funny at such times to watch Harry. The men are probably fretting and straining over some heavy lifting or other difficult task. He first lets fly some irritating raillery in which he addresses them as “terriers;” and then, taking up a position within ear-shot, he begins to sing with a capital Irish brogue:

“Oh, ye work all day for Paddy O’Shea, Dhrrrill, ye terriers, dhrrrill!”

Human nature cannot endure this for long, and presently a shower of sticks and tufts of turf drive Harry from his position and put an end for the time to his song.

Our place is by no means a sinecure. The roads are constantly falling into unrepair and a deal of hard work is necessary to keep them in order. Pick and shovel work, that most heart-breaking of manual toil so far as my experience goes, is mostly in demand, for the old trenches must be kept open and new ones dug, and sometimes the sides of long sections of the road must be buried under a layer of earth to prevent the bare planks from warping in the sun. After six hours of such labor there remain two in the early evening in which we go over every foot of roadway on the grounds and make whatever immediate repairs are necessary. At seven o’clock, Harry reports to the fire department, and then we are free.

It is not altogether easy to account for Harry as a common laborer. A well-set-up, muscular American of about fifty, with a singularly intelligent, shrewd face and the merriest of blue eyes, he might be, from his appearance, a well-to-do contractor. Only once with me has he touched upon the general subject of his past, and then he intimated that formerly he was well off, but that in his business relations he had always passed as a “good fellow.” “And that means, you know,” he said, turning upon me with a significant look, “that means a ‘damn fool!’”

Among the workmen on the grounds whom I have come to know, none has interested me more as a type than an American carpenter with whom I sometimes spend an evening. The man is lonely and uncomfortable in his new surroundings. The novel conditions which here beset him as a workingman are quite as disturbing to him as the unfamiliar setting of his daily life. He clings tenaciously to his individuality, and the new order of things which confronts him here lightly makes strange havoc of all that.

We had not been talking many minutes on the embankment, where one day after dinner we first met, when the man’s case shone clear as day. He is a master-carpenter from a village home in Ohio, and the certainty of steady work for many months at four dollars a day was tempting enough to induce him to leave his family behind and come here. He had arrived a few days before and had found instant employment.

Seeing the man, a tall, fine-looking, self-respecting American mechanic, and hearing him speak, and learning even this little of his history, you had direct vision of his past. You could almost see a comfortable, wooden cottage, of his own building, with a garden-plot about it and flower-beds in front, standing on a well-shaded village street. He owns the cottage and the plot of land, and his children were born there, and he is an officer in the village church, and has been justice of the peace, and more than once has served as “school trustee.” Social inequality, as applying to himself, is a new idea, and it gives him a hitherto unexperienced sense of self-consciousness. In his native village his family meet the families of all his neighbors on the same footing, except that they recognize in the minister, and the doctor, and the village lawyer, and the schoolmaster, a distinction which attaches to special education. His children study and play at school with the children of all his neighbors, and mingle freely with them at church and in their other social relations.

But here is something new and strange. He is no longer a man with a name to distinguish him, but has become a “hand,” having a number which he wears conspicuous on his jacket. He goes to his work as an integer in an army of ten thousand numerals. Home has changed to a barrack, where he, a number, sleeps in a numbered bunk, and eats, never twice at the same place, as one of half a thousand men. His comfort and convenience are never consulted, and his views have no smallest bearing upon the course of things. The superintendent of the building upon which he works, whose energy and skill he admires hugely, shifts him about with scores of other men, with as little regard to him as an individual as though he were a piece of timber. Once he spoke to his superintendent about some detail of the work and found him a most appreciative listener. Then he ventured, in conversation, upon a subject of general interest, only to find that by some mysterious change he was speaking to a stone wall.

And now there confronts him what he regards as another sacrifice of individuality, which he is urged to make, and which gives him no little concern. He had scarcely known of the existence of Trades Unions, and now he is thronged with appeals to join one.

No discrimination is made by the management as between union and non-union men in employing workers on the Exposition; but many of the union men here are making the most of the present opportunity for the propaganda of their principles, and for bringing the desirable non-union men within their organization. My carpenter friend, whom I shall call Mr. Ford, comes in for a large share of attention, and is, as I have intimated, not a little perplexed by the situation.

Two or three times he has asked me to go with him in the evening to meetings which are held near the Fair Grounds, and which are addressed by delegates from the Central Labor Union. These we have not found very enlightening. There has been a good deal of beer-drinking and much aimless speech, which has grown heated at times in the stress of hostile discussion; and now and then a plain, matter-of-fact workingman has given us an admirable talk on the history of Trades-Unionism and its beneficent results, and the imperative need of organization among workers as the only means of safe-guarding their interests and of meeting, on any approach to equal terms, the peculiar economic relations which exist between labor and organized capital.

Mr. Ford, much bewildered, has listened to all this, and we have talked it over together on the way back to our lodgings, and sometimes late into the night. I have tried to explain to him, as well as I understand it, the idea of organization, and the necessity of organization which has grown out of the great industrial change since the middle of the last century. But Mr. Ford, for all practical purposes, belongs to the pre-revolutionary period; the industrial change has little affected him. He served his apprenticeship, and was then a journeyman and then a master-carpenter in due course. In his experience, work has always had its basis in a personal relation, as, for example, between himself as a contractor and the man whose job he undertook and to whom he looked for payment. A like personal relation has always existed between himself and the men whom he has employed.

This new relation between a workman and an impersonal, soulless corporation which hires him, is one that he does not readily grasp. And, for the sake of meeting the new relation, this “fusing all the skirts of self” and merging individuality into an organization which attempts to regulate the hours of labor, and its wages, and for whom one shall work, and for whom not, is a thing abhorrent to him.

“Why,” he said to me, “I give up my independence, and I’m no better than the worst carpenter of the lot. We all get union-wages alike. There’s no incentive for a man to do his best. He ain’t a man any more, anyway; he’s only a part of a machine. Why, such work as some I see done here, I’d be ashamed to do by moonlight, with my eyes shut. But it don’t make no difference in the union, you’re all on the same level, as near as I can make out.”

Finally I proposed to him that we should go together, on some Sunday afternoon, to the meeting of the Central Labor Union, where he could become acquainted with some of the members and learn at first hand the objects and ends of organization and something of its actual working. The members whom I particularly wished him to know were some of the Socialists there, who seemed to me to have a considerable knowledge of Trades-Unionism, and who took, I thought, a judicial view of it.

As an unskilled laborer I was not eligible to membership in any union, but I was admitted freely to the central meetings, to which I sometimes went in company with Socialists who were delegates of their respective orders. Under their tutelage, I was shown the operation of an exceedingly complex system, which, seen without guidance, would have appeared to me hopelessly chaotic. I was seeing it, I realized, from the point of view of the Socialists, and I was interested immediately in learning their attitude.

They are, I found, most ardent supporters of the principle of organization among workingmen. They regard the fact of the organization of wage-earners as among the most significant developments in the evolution of a socialistic state. But they are very impatient of the slow rate of progress in Trades-Unionism. The ignorance of the great mass of workers of how to further their own interests is, to the Socialist, the most discouraging feature in labor-organization. “Why,” they ask, “when we working people already have so strong a nucleus of organization for economic ends, do we not direct it at once into the field of politics, and secure immediately, by our overwhelming numbers, the legislation which we need, and so inaugurate a co-operative commonwealth?”

Nowhere have the walking-delegates and the general agitators of their class sincerer foes than among the Socialists who, more than to any other active cause, attribute the comparative ineffectualness of unionism to the influence of these men. Very readily they believe them purchasable, and that often they are little else than the paid agents of the capitalists. Their great influence over workingmen is used, the Socialists seem to believe, chiefly in their own interests and particularly for selfish political ends.

This habit of mind serves to illustrate what eventually appeared to me to be highly characteristic of the general attitude of Socialists. The key to their mental processes in considering things social, lies, I am quite sure, in the idea of existing conditions as being maintained by a vast capitalistic conspiracy. At all events this clew has cleared up for me the mystery which at first I found in many of their ways of thinking.

However natural may have been the social order in some of its historic phases, they evidently regard it at the present as largely artificial. There is no real vitality, they contend, in the political issues upon which the great national parties are divided. The party cries of “free trade” and “protection” and the like, are manufactured by professional politicians who are in the employ of the capitalists. The purpose is to divert the minds of the working classes by these sham contentions and so keep them about evenly divided politically, and thus prevent their coalescing in overwhelming force in political action for their own interests. Nothing seems to anger a Socialist more than the spectacle of workingmen roused to enthusiasm by the crowds and speeches and processions and brass bands of the usual political campaign. They see in them then only the ridiculous dupes of the capitalists, who have contributed to the campaign funds for the very purpose of thus befooling their employees, and who look with about equal indifference upon the momentary triumph of one party or the other so long as no labor party is in the ascendant.

However free in the past the play of purely natural evolutionary forces may have been in determining social development, and however free may be their course again in moulding a future state, their operation is checked for the present to the Socialists’ vision by the active intervention of the capitalists, who, in some way, have succeeded in effecting a social structure which is highly favorable to themselves, and for whose undisturbed continuance they unscrupulously employ all the resources of wealth and craft and dark conspiracy. The idea appeared at its plainest, perhaps, in their more vindictive speeches, where the strong undercurrent of feeling was--“There is cruel injustice and wrong in society as it is, and someone is to blame for it, and unhesitatingly we charge the blame against the capitalists.”

It was with this interpretation in mind that I took Mr. Ford with me one afternoon to the meeting of the Central Labor Union. I was curious to see the effect of the gathering upon him. A child of another age in his experience of certain economic relations, he was an interesting phenomenon in the sudden contact with modern industrialism.

When we reached the building, in the upper floor of which in a large hall are held the weekly meetings of the Central Labor Union, numbers of workingmen in their Sunday clothes were passing in and out of the neighboring saloons or loafing about the doors. The intersecting streets were strewn with small handbills, which we found covering the wide staircase leading to the hall and scattered over the seats and floor of the room itself. They were printed notices instructing the members to boycott the beer of certain breweries which were accused of employing non-union men, and also the products of this and that manufacturer, against whom similar charges were made.

We were a little early, but we chanced upon a Socialistic acquaintance of mine, who took us in with him and seated us well to the front. As the members entered I had a chance to point out to Mr. Ford those among them who had been pointed out to me as the officers of their various unions. He was deeply interested from the first, and much impressed apparently by the size of the gathering and the enormous numbers of organized workers which were represented there.

The stage of “new business” was barely reached that afternoon when matters were well beyond the control of the president. Motions and amendments and questions of privilege and points of order were fast driving him mad, when in despair he called upon a fellow-member to take charge of the meeting and become its temporary chairman. By this time there was a good deal of confusion; men in many parts of the hall were clamoring for the floor, and trying to drown one another’s voices. But there was immediate recognition of a change of generalship. The man who had taken the chair was a member of a union of musicians, a person of excellent address and well-appearing, and, as it proved eventually, a masterly parliamentarian. To reduce to quiet an assembly so excited was beyond his power, but he did unravel the skein of its tangled business, and through all the uproar and confusion he kept his temper perfectly, and secured some actual disposition of the affairs in hand.

The intricacies of intermingling interests there represented were beyond measure bewildering. The Cigarmakers’ Union had a grievance, which its representatives insisted upon presenting and having righted at once. But the Waiters’ Union claimed an antecedent right to the presentation of a question with reference to admitting certain men to their organization. And the Bricklayers’ Union demanded an immediate investigation of the account of expenditure for a certain recent Union picnic, charging directly, meanwhile, a flagrant misappropriation of funds.

Passions were running high. The lie direct was passed repeatedly, and men were all but shaking fists in one another’s faces. The shouting rose sometimes to such a pitch that the chairman’s voice could not be heard. But the passion was that of strong vitality. The Union, to its members, was an intensely living thing, and its issues, touching them so closely, most naturally roused comparatively untutored men to strong emotion.

I watched Mr. Ford with curious interest. Instead of showing any impatience or disgust at the show of temper and the loud disorder, he sat through the long session deeply, intently absorbed. Every question for debate, and every phase of discussion, and all the progress of the business, and the varying claims of the many organizations, and the widely differing personalities of the members, each won his vital interest, and, with amazing discrimination, he seemed to follow them with intelligent understanding. And when there came a report of progress in a strike among certain workers in shoe factories, and a statement of the causes of the strike and the measures which were being taken to carry it to a successful issue, I could see that he was more than ever roused.

“That’s the most interesting meeting I ever was to,” he said to me, as we walked down the street together. “I ain’t never realized before how mixed up things can be when there’s so many working people, and the men that hire them are mostly all organized in big companies. Why, the working people ain’t got nothing else they can do but organize too, to get their just rights. They have a pretty hot time in their meetings, if that’s a sample, but I guess they’ll know what they’re about. I guess I’ll join.”

* * * * *

In a very few days I must leave Chicago. I own to a longing to go and launch out upon the great farming regions between the Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, which I hope to cover in my journey before the autumn is far spent. I have been watching the coming of the spring in the Exposition grounds and in the charming parks of the city and along its beautiful boulevards, and I feel its subtle drawings to the country, to a life once more of labor in the fields. But I am very far from being prepared to go. Some little of a phase of life which in all large centres of population accompanies the swift industrial changes of the present I have seen here in Chicago, where it differs but slightly from similar conditions in every congested labor market. And under the play of the modern gregarious instinct there surely are few centralized markets which are not congested. But of the real city as a great positive force and a world-wide commercial power, whose unfaltering energies have built a huge metropolis in a generation, and are fast crowning their labors with splendid achievements in education and in art, I have been able to see little, and I have given no impression whatever. This much I have seen on the grounds where I am now a workman: I have watched something of the slow emerging from a scene of utter chaos of a co-ordinated scheme of landscape-gardening and of architecture, which has long passed the experimental stage, and is unfolding to the world, by a miracle of creative and constructive genius, a real vision of beauty and power and grace, which certainly holds for the living generation of civilized men a promise of rich blessings.