St. Cuthbert's Part 10

"Let us thank G.o.d we have escaped from the cla.s.s tyranny and the peasant bondage of the land beyond the seas."

A new and different light was now upon the rapt faces of the men--and the end of it all was that they turned the diamond-ringed gentlemen from their doors.

XIV

_WITH The EMPLOYERS_

Nor was this the last of Angus's eloquence. A few days later the manufacturers, being met in conclave at Mr. Blake's office, sent for the young Scotsman and personally thanked him for his good offices in settling the strike. Both sorts were there--the kind and the unkind, the gentleman and the churl--but all alike united in grateful praise for the mediation which Angus had accomplished. Many unctuous things were said, but when one tyrant arose to speak his grat.i.tude, Angus's face bore a look which boded ill.

"We're glad," said Mr. M'Dougall, swelling with vulgar pompousness, "to see that you recognize the rights of property and the claims of vested interests. And we trust," he added, "that Labour has learned a lesson it will not soon forget." Then he sat down with the majesty of a balloon descending.

"I am glad, sir," replied Angus, "to have been of service in quelling a movement led by selfish and grasping strangers, but I may at the same time say that it would be well for Mr. M'Dougall and his kind to pay more heed himself to the rights of property. For skill and industry and faithfulness are property just as much as Mr. M'Dougall's vested interests. And he may as well be warned that Labour will not forever tolerate the selfishness and the pride with which he treats his hands."

"I move," interrupted Mr. Thoburn, himself a gifted tyrant, "that this meeting do now adjourn."

"This meeting will do nothing of the sort." This time it was Mr. Blake who spoke, and there was iron in his voice. "None of us thought Mr.

Strachan spoke too long when he was dealing with the agitators from Chicago, and let us hear him out, unless we are bigger cowards than the men who work for us."

The meeting endorsed these sentiments, and Angus resumed--

"I speak in the interests of Capital," he said, "when I declare that the fault is not all on the side of the working man. Many of our employers are kind and sympathetic men, but others of them are not. I envy no man among you the wealth he has gathered, but the selfishness of some of our manufacturers is maddening to the working man.

"Some of you know nothing of our trials and our difficulties, and, what is worse, you do not want to know. You pa.s.s by the men who are making you rich as though they were the dogs of the street. You sit next pew to them in the kirk, and yet treat them like the dirt beneath your feet. It is doubtless your conviction that you have discharged your whole duty to us when you pay our wages every fortnight. I tell you," he cried pa.s.sionately, "that is the great fallacy which is yet to prove the undoing of the employers of labour.

"You forget we are men, as well as you, and have higher claims upon you than your pay sheet acknowledges. If our employer dies, we follow him in a body to his grave. If one of us dies, you drive past his hea.r.s.e with your haughty carriages, or bolt down a side street to avoid the a.s.sociation.

"Tom Lamplough, who has worked for Mr. Thoburn twenty years, buried his only child last Thursday, and his employer spent the afternoon speeding his thoroughbred on the race-track beside the cemetery. At the very moment when Tom was groping about the open grave, struggling with his broken heart and following his daughter with streaming eyes, Mr. Thoburn was bawling out that his filly had done it in two and a quarter--and the clods were falling on the coffin all the while."

At this juncture Thoburn arose, his face the very colour of the corpse he had disdained.

"Will no man throttle this fanatic?" he hoa.r.s.ely craved. "Must we be insulted thus by a mere working man?"

"I insult no man," retorted his accuser, "when I tell him but the truth.

It was you who insulted the dead, and outraged her desolate father because he was but your servant. Is what I say the truth?"

"I decline to answer that," said Thoburn.

"You will not decline to answer before the throne of G.o.d. For you and Tom will meet yonder. Good G.o.d, man, did you ever think of that? Did it ever occur to you that you and Tom will take your last ride in the same conveyance, and have the same upholstery in the tomb? And somebody else's filly will be making its mile in less time than yours when the clods are falling on your coffin."

I have often marvelled at this strange power of rhetoric in an untutored man; but it only confirmed what I am more and more inclined to believe--that emotion and intellect are twins, and that the soul is oratory's native home.

There was a pause, but it was brief. For there flew to the rescue of his beleaguered brother Mr. Hiram Orme, the millionaire proprietor of the great Acme works. Vulgar and proud, he lived a life of ostentatious luxury.

No thought of the poor or the suffering ever disturbed the shallow tenor of his enamelled existence Secure in the fortress of wealth, which is a lie! he cared nothing for such wounded soldiers as had helped to build it, or for their widows or their orphans. With all sail set, he careened on his inconsiderate way, and the vessels whose side he sought were never those bearing the signals of distress.

Mr. Hiram Orme had a high contempt for all working men, and a keen suspicion of every att.i.tude which smacked of liberty. The working man, like the negro, was happier far in a state of semi-slavery--such was the honest view of the honest man.

And now he was upon his feet, glaring with wrath, profoundly complacent in the a.s.surance of superior wealth, and prepared to demolish both Angus and the King's English at a blow.

"Them's nice words," he broke forth, "for a working man to be using to the man what he's dependent on for to get his bread and b.u.t.ter. And I want for to tell this man Strachan that beggars can't be choosers. A pretty preachment he's givin' us about coffins and them like things.

There's one thing certain, and that is, me and the rest of my brother manufacturers will have a sight finer coffins than him and his sort will have." The manufacturers shuddered, like men sitting in some deadly draught.

"We've had jist about enough sa.s.s from our young friend, I think; he's nothin' but a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for us anyhow.

Doesn't the Bible tell servants like him for to be obedient to their masters?"

Then Angus's Scotch blood leaped, protesting, to his face, and his soul tore open his burning lips as the tide bursts a dam built by children's hands.

"I eat honest bread, earned by honest toil," he hotly cried, "and that is more than Mr. Orme can say. I would beg from door to door before I would munch, as he does, the crusts that are stained with blood. We all know how he has ground his working girls to the earth, how he has refused to ventilate his factories, and even to heat them decently in the winter time. We all know how he has spurned the poor and the needy with his foot, and how he has crawled upon his belly before the rich and great. I will tell you something about Mr. Orme. It does not apply to all of you. Some of you, thank G.o.d! have remembered that your working men were human beings like yourselves--you have helped and befriended the sick and the poor, you have pensioned the closing years of faithful men. You have called yourselves to ask for our sick and dying, and we have blessed you for it. What poor burdened hearts want is the warm heart touch from your own hands or lips, but Mr. Orme has given neither the one nor the other.

"Mr. Orme, do you remember d.i.c.k Draper, who was your boss carder, and who lives in a little house behind your mansion? Do you remember that he worked for you ten or fifteen years, and that you discharged him because he would not leave the Union?"

"Yes, I remember him. Why?" answered Orme huskily.

"I will tell you why. A few months after you discharged him, partly because his health failed and partly because you blackballed him at all other shops, he was still out of work, his money all gone, his pantry bare, and his youngest boy dying of a slow disease of the spine. Some of us went to you and asked you to help us raise enough to send him to Montreal for treatment that might save his life. You showed us the door, and told us to tell him he could make his money like you made yours. You said if the boy died it would be one mouth less for d.i.c.k to feed, and told us there was a grand old maxim about every man for himself and the devil have the hindermost. As we were going down your splendid avenue, you shouted that d.i.c.k's spine was stiff enough when he joined the Union.

Then you asked us if spines were hereditary. Then you laughed and your barns and your grand driving sheds echoed back its cruel mockery."

Orme arose and started towards the door.

"Mr. Chairman, I protest," he began.

"Sit doon," thundered Angus, lapsing into his native tongue, "sit doon till I tell ye a'. The nicht d.i.c.k's boy was deein', we went to ye and begged ye to stop yir music and yir dancin'. For ye had some graun' fowk at yir pairty, an' the flowers for it cost ye mair nor wad hae sent the laddie to Montreal. An' the noise fashed an' fretted the deein' bairn.

But ye bade us begone, an' said ye'd invite us to yir pairty when ye wanted us--an' the puir laddie dee'd in his faither's airms to the cruel music o' yir fiddles an' yir reels, an' his faither sat wi' him a' the nicht, croonin' wi' sorrow, an' yir graun' guests' laughter breakin' on him like a blizzard frae the north."

"Is the sermon nearly done?" said Mr. Orme, with a sneer. "You missed your calling; you're a preacher." The hot tears were in Angus' eyes and he seemed to have forgotten that Orme was present, the taunt lost upon him.

"I will say no more," turning now to the others, "and I have perhaps spoken over warmly. But I have uttered no word other than the truth. And I will only make my last appeal, which I know will have some weight, with most of you, at least. The remedy for all this threatening trouble lies in mutual sympathy, for I doubt not you have your own difficulties, even as we have ours. I am glad to have helped to allay this recent trouble, and my best service shall never be denied you in the future.

But I pray you to consider the words of a man who wishes you nothing else but good. Pardon what of violence and ponder what of reason has been mixed with what I said. Capital has its labour, and labour has its capital--and we are all toilers together."

He bowed to the employers and withdrew, but the seed his hand had cast was fallen, some no doubt on rocky ground, but some also on good and honest soil.

And Angus had won a victory; but his greatest triumph was unseen, for he had ruled his own spirit, which high authority a.s.sures us is greater than the taking of a city.

Not inconsiderable, too, were the outward pledges of his victory. For, as we said, the sleek agitators had been dismissed, the mills and factories were running again, and the industrial tides of life in New Jedboro gradually subsided into their old channels.

And now those unseen forces that are ever silently working to upset old standards and to displace old ways, broke out in a new form, this time threatening the very centre of one of St. Cuthbert's most established customs.

XV

_A BOLD PROPOSAL_