It should not need any argument to prove all this. There seldom is a great strike at any manufacturing centre during which a large number of the operatives do not disappear. Some of them find work elsewhere in their own specialty, but the oldest inhabitant, or the village gossip, or some one else who has time to pay close attention to other people’s business, can tell you that some of these men have struck out for themselves in some other direction, and they very seldom are able to tell you that any such change of business has brought unfortunate results. It has already been said in this book that some of the great industries of the country to-day are managed by men who once were common laborers.
However ignorant the workingman may be of the fact, or however willing he may be to ignore it, the truth is that the workingman half a century ago was a great deal worse off than his successors to-day. He worked longer hours, he got smaller pay--I mean smaller pay in proportion to the purchasing power of money, and his social position was very bad. Even the Revolutionary war, the Declaration of Independence, the rights of man, and all that sort of thing, didn’t break down at once the laws of caste that had come to us from the old country. It was not so very long ago that even the students of Harvard University were classified according to their ancestry, the list being led by gentlemen, which was followed by the profession and then brought up by the general assortment of what the late Mr. Venus called “humans various.”
The apprentice was not only household servant as well as work-boy to his employer, but he was kept in order by a strap or a club, and the law not only could give him no redress for personal abuse, but it recognized the right of the employer to treat his boys in that manner. Boys brought up in that way had not much independence when they became men, and the independent spirit of the present generation was a thing almost unknown in the more thickly settled communities at that time. The workingman in that day was more religious than his successors in the present generation, but when he went to church he sat in the poorest seats; generally he sat in the gallery. When he was out of work he went to the poor-house. The poor-house was built especially for people of his kind. Perhaps in some of the large cities workingmen and their families go to the poor-house to-day, but most of them will take pains to go to another community than that in which they are known before they allow themselves to be supported in such manner.