"I think more than that," I replied. "It sets women free to compete with men, and beat down men"s wages."
"Oh, what a puzzle!" she exclaimed, and then: "Is there any way of helping the poor that wouldn"t be open to the same objection?"
That brought us once more to the subject I had put aside at our last meeting. She had not forgotten it, and asked again for an explanation.
What did I mean by the compet.i.tive wage system?
My purpose in this writing is to tell the story of Sylvia Castleman"s life, to show, not merely what she was, but what she became. I have to make real to you a process of growth in her soul, and at this moment the important event is her discovery of the cla.s.s-struggle and her reaction to it. You may say, perhaps, that you are not interested in the cla.s.s-struggle, but you cannot alter the fact that you live in an age when millions of people are having the course of their lives changed by the discovery of it. Here, for instance, is a girl who has been taught to keep her promises, and has promised to love, honour and obey a man; she is to find the task more difficult, because she comes to understand the compet.i.tive wage-system while he does not understand it and does not wish to. If that seems to you strange material out of which to make a domestic drama, I can only tell you that you have missed some of the vital facts of your own time.
I gave her a little lesson in elementary economics. I showed her how, when a capitalist needed labour, he bought it in the open market, like any other commodity. He did not think about the human side of it, he paid the market-price, which came to be what the labourer had to have in order to live. No labourer could get more, because others would take less.
"If that be true," I continued, "one of the things that follows is the futility of charity. Whatever you do for the wage-worker on a general scale comes sooner or later out of his wages. If you take care of his children all day or part of the day, he can work for less; if he doesn"t discover that someone else does, and underbids him and takes his place.
If you feed his children at school, if you bury him free, if you insure his life, or even give him a dinner on Christmas Day, you simply enable his landlord to charge him more, or his employer to pay him less."
Sylvia sat for a while in thought, and then asked: "What can be done about such a fact?"
"The first thing to be done is to make sure that you understand it.
Nine-tenths of the people who concern themselves with social questions don"t, and so they waste their time in futilities. For instance, I read the other day an article by a benevolent old gentleman who believed that the social problem could be solved by teaching the poor to chew their food better, so that they would eat less. You may laugh at that, but it"s not a bit more absurd than the idea of our men of affairs, that the thing to do is to increase the efficiency of the workers, and so produce more goods."
"You mean the working-man doesn"t get more, even when he produces more?"
"Take the case of the gla.s.s factories. Men used to get eight dollars a day there, but someone invented a machine that did the work of a dozen men, and that machine is run by a boy for fifty cents a day."
A little pucker of thought came between her eyes. "Might there not be a law forbidding the employer to reduce wages?"
"A minimum wage law. But that would raise the cost of the product, and drive the trade to another state."
She suggested a national law, and when I pointed out that the trade would go to other countries, she fell back on the tariff. I felt like an embryologist--watching the individual repeating the history of the race!
"Protection and prosperity!" I said, with a smile. "Don"t you see the increase in the cost of living? The working-man gets more money in his pay envelope, but he can"t buy more with it because prices go up. And even supposing you could pa.s.s a minimum wage law, and stop compet.i.tion in wages, you"d only change it to compet.i.tion in efficiency--you"d throw the old and the feeble and the untrained into pauperism."
"You make the world seem a hard place to live in," protested Sylvia.
"I"m simply telling you the elementary facts of business. You can forbid the employer to pay less than a standard wage, but you can"t compel him to employ people who aren"t able to earn that wage. The business-man doesn"t employ for fun, he does it for the profit there is in it."
"If that is true," said Sylvia, quickly, "then the way of employing people is cruel."
"But what other way could you have?"
She considered. "They could be employed so that no one would make a profit. Then surely they could be paid enough to live decently!"
"But whose interest would it be to employ them without profit?"
"The State should do it, if no one else will."
I had been playing a game with Sylvia, as no doubt you have perceived.
"Surely," I said, "you wouldn"t approve anything like that!"
"But why not?"
"Because, it would be Socialism."
She looked at me startled. "Is that Socialism?"
"Of course it is. It"s the essence of Socialism."
"But then--what"s the harm in it?"
I laughed. "I thought you said that Socialism was a menace, like divorce!"
I had my moment of triumph, but then I discovered how fond was the person who imagined that he could play with Sylvia. "I suspect you are something of a Socialist yourself," she remarked.
She told me a long time afterwards what had been her emotions during these early talks. It was the first time in her life that she had ever listened to ideas that were hostile to her order, and she did so with tremblings and hesitations, combating at every step an impulse to flee to the shelter of conventionality. She was more shocked by my last revelation than she let me suspect. It counted for little that I had succeeded in trapping her in proposing for herself the economic programme of Socialism, for what terrifies her cla.s.s is not our economic programme, it is our threat of slave-rebellion. I had been brought up in a part of the world where democracy is a tradition, a word to conjure with, and I supposed that this would be the case with any American--that I would only have to prove that Socialism was democracy applied to industry. How could I have imagined the kind of "democracy" which had been taught to Sylvia by her Uncle Mandeville, the politician of the family, who believed that America was soon to have a king, to keep the "foreign riff-raff" in its place!
14. At this time I was living in a three-roomed apartment in one of the new "model tenements" on the East Side. I had a saying about the place, that it was "built for the proletariat and occupied by cranks." What an example for Sylvia of the futility of charity--the effort on the part of benevolent capitalists to civilise the poor by putting bath-tubs in their homes, and the discovery that the graceless creatures were using them for the storage of coals!
Having heard these strange stories, Sylvia was anxious to visit me, and I was, of course, glad to invite her. I purchased a fancy brand of tea, and some implements for the serving of it, and she came, and went into raptures over my three rooms and bath, no one of which would have made more than a closet in her own apartments. I suspected that this was her Southern _n.o.blesse oblige_, but I knew also that in my living room there were some rows of books, which would have meant more to Sylvia van Tuiver just then than the contents of several clothes-closets.
I was pleased to discover that my efforts had not been wasted. She had been thinking, and she had even found time, in the midst of her distractions, to read part of a book. In the course of our talks I had mentioned Veblen, and she had been reading s.n.a.t.c.hes of his work on the Leisure Cla.s.s, and I was surprised, and not a little amused, to observe her reaction to it.
When I talked about wages and hours of labour, I was dealing with things that were remote from her, and difficult to make real; but Veblen"s theme, the idle rich, and the arts and graces whereby they demonstrate their power, was the stuff of which her life was made. The subtleties of social ostentation, the minute distinctions between the newly-rich and the anciently-rich, the solemn certainties of the latter and the quivering anxieties of the former--all those were things which Sylvia knew as a bird knows the way of the wind. To see the details of them a.n.a.lysed in learned, scientific fashion, explained with great mouthfuls of words which one had to look up in the dictionary--that was surely a new discovery in the book-world! "Conspicuous leisure!" "Vicarious consumption of goods!" "Oh, de-ah me, how que-ah!" exclaimed Sylvia.
And what a flood of anecdotes it let loose! A flood that bore us straight back to Castleman Hall, and to all the scenes of her young ladyhood! If only Lady Dee could have revised this book of Veblen"s, how many points she could have given to him! No details had been too minute for the technique of Sylvia"s great-aunt--the difference between the swish of the right kind of silk petticoats and the wrong kind; and yet her technique had been broad enough to take in a landscape. "Every girl should have a background," had been one of her maxims, and Sylvia had to have a special phaeton to drive, a special horse to ride, special roses which no one else was allowed to wear.
"Conspicuous expenditure of time," wrote Veblen. It was curious, said Sylvia, but n.o.body was free from this kind of vanity. There was dear old Uncle Basil, a more G.o.dly bishop never lived, and yet he had a foible for carving! In his opinion the one certain test of a gentleman was the ease with which he found the joints of all kinds of meat, and he was in arms against the modern tendency to turn such accomplishments over to butlers. He would hold forth on the subject, ill.u.s.trating his theories with an elegant knife, and Sylvia remembered how her father and the Chilton boys had wired up the joints of a duck for the bishop to work on. In the struggle the bishop had preserved his dignity, but lost the duck, and the bishop"s wife, being also high-born, and with a long line of traditions behind her, had calmly continued the conversation, while the butler removed the smoking duck from her lap!
Such was the way of things at Castleman Hall! The wild, care-free people--like half-grown children, romping their way through life! There was really nothing too crazy for them to do, if the whim struck them.
Once a visiting cousin had ventured the remark that she saw no reason why people should not eat rats; a barn-rat was clean in its person, and far choicer in its food than a pig. Thereupon "Miss Margaret" had secretly ordered the yard-man to secure a barn-rat; she had had it broiled, and served in a dish of squirrels, and had sat by and watched the young lady enjoy it! And this, mind you, was Mrs. Castleman of Castleman Hall, mother of five children, and as stately a dame as ever led the grand march at the Governor"s inaugural ball! "Major Castleman,"
she would say to her husband, "you may take me into my bedroom, and when you have locked the door securely, you may spit upon me, if you wish; but don"t you dare even to _imagine_ anything undignified about me in public!"
15. In course of time Sylvia and I became very good friends. Proud as she was, she was lonely, and in need of some one to open her eager mind to. Who was there safer to trust than this plain Western woman, who lived so far, both in reality and in ideas, from the great world of fashion?
Before we parted she considered it necessary to mention my relationship to this world. She had a most acute social conscience. She knew exactly what formalities she owed to everyone, just when she ought to call, and how long she ought to stay, and what she ought to ask the other person to do in return; she a.s.sumed that the other knew it all exactly as well, and would suffer if she failed in the slightest degree.
So now she had to throw herself upon my mercy. "You see," she explained, "my husband wouldn"t understand. I may be able to change him gradually, but if I shock him all at once--"
"My dear Mrs. van Tuiver--" I smiled.
"You can"t really imagine!" she persisted. "You see, he takes his social position so seriously! And when you are conspicuous--when everybody"s talking about what you do--when everything that"s the least bit unusual is magnified--"
"My dear girl!" I broke in again. "Stop a moment and let me talk!"
"But I hate to have to think--"
"Don"t worry about my thoughts! They are most happy ones! You must understand that a Socialist cannot feel about such things as you do; we work out our economic interpretation of them, and after that they are simply so much data to us. I might meet one of your great friends, and she might snub me, but I would never think she had snubbed _me_--it would be my Western accent, and my forty-cent hat, and things like that which had put me in a cla.s.s in her mind. My real self n.o.body can snub--certainly not until they"ve got at it."
"Ah!" said Sylvia, with shining eyes. "You have your own kind of aristocracy, I see!"
"What I want," I said, "is you. I"m an old hen whose chickens have grown up and left her, and I want something to mother. Your wonderful social world is just a bother to me, because it keeps me from gathering you into my arms as I"d like to. So what you do is to think of some role for me to play, so that I can come to see you; let me be advising you about your proposed day-nursery, or let me be a tutor of something, or a nice, respectable sewing-woman who darns the toes of your silk stockings!"