THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION
That caravan of railroad cars bearing the happy lodge members to their meeting in the Rockies, had started a train of thought that went winding through my mind ever after. In fancy I saw the envious Bannerman shaking his fist at his thriftier, happier brothers. Should I denounce the banding together of men for the promotion of fun and good fellowship? Were these men hastening the downfall of America as the communist predicted? Is not good fellowship a necessary feeling in the hearts of civilized men?
Love of comrades had always been a ruling passion with me. Ijoined my union as soon as I had learned my trade, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers of North America. It was a long name, and we liked every word in it. We felt the glow of brotherhood, and as I said before, we used to share our jobs with the brother who was out of work. The union paid a weekly benefit to men who had to strike for better working conditions. At that time there were no death benefits nor any fund to educate the children of members killed in the mills. When such a death happened, the union appointed a committee to stand at the office window on pay-day and ask every man to contribute something from his wages. There is a charitable spirit among men who labor together and they always gave freely to any fund for the widow and orphans. This spirit is the force that lifts man above the beasts and makes his civilization. There is no mercy in brute nature. The hawk eats the sparrow; the fox devours the young rabbit; the cat leaps from under a bush and kills the mother robin while the young are left to starve in the nest.
There is neither right nor wrong among the brutes because they have no moral sense. They do not kill for revenge nor torture for the love of cruelty, as Comrade Bannerman would in praying that the train be wrecked and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. The beasts can feel no pity, no sympathy, no regret, for nature gave them no conscience. But man differs from all creation because he has a moral sense, he has a conscience. My conscience has been a very present thing with me through all my life. I am a praying man. I never take a doubtful step until I have prayed for guidance.
"You'll never get anywhere, Jim," fellows have said to me, "as long as your conscience is so darn active. To win in this world you have got to be slick. What a man earns will keep him poor.
It's what he gains that makes him rich." If this is so, the nation with the lowest morals will have the most wealth. But the truth is just the opposite. The richest nations are those that have the highest moral sense.
But this was a great problem for a young uneducated man. To be told by some of my fellows that dishonesty was the only road to wealth, and to be shown in communist documents that the capitalists of America were stealing everything from the workers, put a mighty problem up to me. And that's what made me pray for guidance. I pray because I want an answer, and when it comes Irecognize 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 Iwent 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 Ihad ever entertained. It was born of my own need of knowledge. It was a dream I feared I could not hope to realize.
