The Iron Puddler [32]
comes I recognize in it my own conscience. Praying banishes all selfish thoughts from mind, and gives the voice of conscience a chance to be heard. I pray for a higher moral sense, that which lifts man above beasts, and when my answer comes and I feel morally right, then all hell can't make me knuckle under. For civilization is built on man's morals not on brute force (as Germany learned to her sorrow), and I fight for the moral law as long as there is any fight left in me.
Nature planned that when the cat ate the mother robin, the young robins in the nest must starve. Nature had other robins that would escape the enemy. But among men it is wrong for the little ones to suffer when the hand that feeds them is destroyed. For man has sympathy, which beasts have not. Sympathy is the iron fiber in man that welds him to his fellows. Envy is the sulphur that pollutes these bonds and makes them brittle. Suppose some master puddler of humanity could gather thousands of men into a melting-pot, a fraternity whose purpose was to boil out the envy, greed and malice as much as possible, and purify the good metal of human sympathy. How much greater the social value of these men would be. Bound together by good fellowship and human sympathy these men could pool their charity and build a happy city where all the children of their stricken comrades could be sent to school together, there to learn that man is moral, that the strong do not destroy the weak, that the nestling is not left to fate, but that the fatherless are fathered by all men whose hearts have heard their cry.
This vision came to me in the darkest days of my life. I had seen the children of my dead comrades scattered like leaves from a smitten tree never to meet again. I had left my parents' roof to be buffeted about by strikes and unemployment, and I feared that our home would be lost and my brothers scattered forever. The voice of hate was whispering that the "classes" would ride down the children of the poor, and with this gloomy thought I went to bed. My couch was a bed of coal slack, and I was journeying to a mill town in a freight car.
As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train after train of lodge men going to some happy city. They were miners and steel workers, as well as clerks and teachers, and they were banded together, not like Reds to overthrow the wage system, but to teach themselves and their children how to make the wage system shed its greatest blessings upon all. The city they were going to was one they had built with their own hands. And in that city was a school where every trade was taught to fatherless children, as my father taught his trade to me. And with this trade each child received the liberal education that the rich man gives his son but which the poor man goes without. This was the wildest fancy I had ever entertained. It was born of my own need of knowledge. It was a dream I feared I could not hope to realize.
CHAPTER XXIV
JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN
A brakeman stuck his head in the end window of the box car and shouted at me:
"Where're you going?"
"Birmingham," I answered.
"What have you got to go on?"
I had some money in my belt, but I would need that for the boarding-house keeper in the Alabama iron town. So I drew something from my vest pocket and said:
"This is all I've got left."
The trainman examined it by the dim light at the window. His eye told him that it was a fine gold watch. "All right," he said as be pocketed it and went away. I never knew whether I cheated the brakeman or the brakeman cheated me. The watch wasn't worth as much as the ride, but the ride wasn't his to sell.
I had bought the watch in Cincinnati. A fake auction in a pawnshop attracted my attention as I walked along a street near the depot. The auctioneer was offering a "solid gold, Swiss movement, eighteen jeweled watch" to the highest bidder. "This watch belongs to my friend Joe Coupling," he said, "a brakeman on the B. & O. He was in a wreck and is now in the hospital. Everybody knows that one of the best things a railroader
Nature planned that when the cat ate the mother robin, the young robins in the nest must starve. Nature had other robins that would escape the enemy. But among men it is wrong for the little ones to suffer when the hand that feeds them is destroyed. For man has sympathy, which beasts have not. Sympathy is the iron fiber in man that welds him to his fellows. Envy is the sulphur that pollutes these bonds and makes them brittle. Suppose some master puddler of humanity could gather thousands of men into a melting-pot, a fraternity whose purpose was to boil out the envy, greed and malice as much as possible, and purify the good metal of human sympathy. How much greater the social value of these men would be. Bound together by good fellowship and human sympathy these men could pool their charity and build a happy city where all the children of their stricken comrades could be sent to school together, there to learn that man is moral, that the strong do not destroy the weak, that the nestling is not left to fate, but that the fatherless are fathered by all men whose hearts have heard their cry.
This vision came to me in the darkest days of my life. I had seen the children of my dead comrades scattered like leaves from a smitten tree never to meet again. I had left my parents' roof to be buffeted about by strikes and unemployment, and I feared that our home would be lost and my brothers scattered forever. The voice of hate was whispering that the "classes" would ride down the children of the poor, and with this gloomy thought I went to bed. My couch was a bed of coal slack, and I was journeying to a mill town in a freight car.
As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train after train of lodge men going to some happy city. They were miners and steel workers, as well as clerks and teachers, and they were banded together, not like Reds to overthrow the wage system, but to teach themselves and their children how to make the wage system shed its greatest blessings upon all. The city they were going to was one they had built with their own hands. And in that city was a school where every trade was taught to fatherless children, as my father taught his trade to me. And with this trade each child received the liberal education that the rich man gives his son but which the poor man goes without. This was the wildest fancy I had ever entertained. It was born of my own need of knowledge. It was a dream I feared I could not hope to realize.
CHAPTER XXIV
JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN
A brakeman stuck his head in the end window of the box car and shouted at me:
"Where're you going?"
"Birmingham," I answered.
"What have you got to go on?"
I had some money in my belt, but I would need that for the boarding-house keeper in the Alabama iron town. So I drew something from my vest pocket and said:
"This is all I've got left."
The trainman examined it by the dim light at the window. His eye told him that it was a fine gold watch. "All right," he said as be pocketed it and went away. I never knew whether I cheated the brakeman or the brakeman cheated me. The watch wasn't worth as much as the ride, but the ride wasn't his to sell.
I had bought the watch in Cincinnati. A fake auction in a pawnshop attracted my attention as I walked along a street near the depot. The auctioneer was offering a "solid gold, Swiss movement, eighteen jeweled watch" to the highest bidder. "This watch belongs to my friend Joe Coupling," he said, "a brakeman on the B. & O. He was in a wreck and is now in the hospital. Everybody knows that one of the best things a railroader