On their part the laborers were no better. Their relations to their
employers being "purely commercial," as it was called, they put no heart
into their work, seeking ever to do as little as possible for their money,
precisely as their employers sought to pay as little as possible for the
work they got. The interests of the two classes being thus antagonized,
they grew to distrust and hate each other, and each accession of ill
feeling produced acts which tended to broaden the breach more and more.
There was neither cheerful service on the one side nor ungrudging payment
on the other.
The harder industrial conditions generated by woman's irruption into a new
domain of activity produced among laboring men a feeling of blind
discontent and concern. Like all men in apprehension, they drew together
for mutual protection, they knew not clearly against what. They formed
"labor unions," and believed them to be something new and effective in the
betterment of their condition; whereas, from the earliest historical
times, in Rome, in Greece, in Egypt, in Assyria, labor unions with their
accepted methods of "striking" and rioting had been discredited by an
almost unbroken record of failure. One of the oldest manuscripts then in
existence, preserved in a museum at Turin, but now lost, related how the
workmen employed in the necropolis at Thebes, dissatisfied with their
allowance of corn and oil, had refused to work, broken out of their
quarters and, after much rioting, been subdued by the arrows of the
military.
Pages:
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57