THE IRON PUDDLER

MY LIFE IN THE ROLLING MILLS AND WHAT CAME OF IT

By James J. Davis

Introduction by Joseph G. Cannon

The man whose life story is here presented between book covers is at the time of writing only forty-eight years old. When I met him many years ago he was a young man full of enthusiasm. I remember saying to him then, “With your enthusiasm and the sparkle which you have in your eyes I am sure you will make good.”

Why should so young a man, one so recently elevated to official prominence, write his memoirs? That question will occur to those who do not know Jim Davis. His elevation to a Cabinet post marks not the beginning of his career, but rather is the curtain-rise on the second act of one of those dramatic lives with which America has so often astounded the world. Bruised and bleeding in a southern, peon camp, where he and other hungry men had been trapped by a brutal slave driver, he drank the bitter cup of unrequited toil. And from this utter depth, in less than thirty years, he rose to the office of secretary of labor. There is drama enough for one life if his career should end to-day. And while this man fought his way upward, he carried others with him, founding by his efforts and their cooperation, the great school called Mooseheart. More than a thousand students of both sexes, ranging from one to eighteen years, are there receiving their preparation for life. The system of education observed there is probably the best ever devised to meet the needs of all humanity.

The brain of James J. Davis fathered this educational system. It is his contribution to the world, and the world has accepted it. The good it promised is already being realized, its fruits are being gathered. Its blessings are falling on a thousand young Americans, and its influence like a widening ripple is extending farther every day. It promises to reach and benefit every child in America. And to hasten the growth of this new education, James J. Davis has here written the complete story. I have known Mr. Davis many years and am one of the thousands who believe in him and have helped further his work.

The author of this autobiography is indeed a remarkable man. He is sometimes called the Napoleon of Fraternity. Love of his fellows is his ruling passion. He can call more than ten thousand men by their first names. His father taught him this motto: “No man is greater than his friends. All the good that comes into your life will come from your friends. If you lose your friends your enemies will destroy you.” Davis has stood by his friends. As a labor leader and a fraternal organizer, he has proved his ability. Thousands think he is unequaled as an orator, thinker and entertainer. His zeal is all for humanity and he knows man's needs. He has dedicated his life to the cause of better education for the workers of this land. His cause deserves a hearing.

J G Cannon WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE, 1922.

PREFACE

“Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto?” asked the city attorney.

The prisoner looked sheepish and made no answer. A box car had been robbed on the eighth and this man had been arrested in the freight yards. He claimed to be a steel worker and had shown the judge his calloused hands. He had answered several questions about his trade, his age and where he was when the policeman arrested him. But when they asked him what he had been doing previous to and immediately subsequent thereto, he hung his head as if at a loss for an alibi.

I was city clerk at the time and had been a steel worker. I knew why the man refused to answer. He didn't understand the phraseology.

“Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto?” the attorney asked him for the third time.

All the prisoner could do was look guilty and say nothing.

“Answer the question,” ordered the judge, “or I'll send you up for vagrancy.”

Still the man kept silent. Then I spoke up:

“John, tell the court where you were before you came here and also where you have been since you arrived in the city.”

“I was in Pittsburgh,” he said, and he proceeded to tell the whole story of his life. He was still talking when they chased him out of court and took up the next case. He was a free man, and yet he had come within an inch of going to jail. All because he didn't know what “previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto” meant.

The man was an expert puddler. A puddler makes iron bars. They were going to put him behind his own bars because he couldn't understand the legal jargon. Thanks to the great educational system of America the working man has improved his mental muscle as well as his physical.

This taught me a lesson. Jargon can put the worker in jail. Big words and improper phraseology are prison bars that sometimes separate the worker from the professional people. “Stone walls do not a prison make,” because the human mind can get beyond them. But thick-shelled words do make a prison. They are something that the human mind can not penetrate. A man whose skill is in his hands can puddle a two hundred-pound ball of iron. A man whose skill is on his tongue can juggle four-syllable words. But that iron puddler could not savvy four-syllable words any more than the word juggler could puddle a heat of iron. The brain worker who talks to the hand worker in a special jargon the latter can not understand has built an iron wall between the worker's mind and his mind. To tear down that wall and make America one nation with one language is one of the tasks of the new education.

If big words cause misunderstandings, why not let them go? When the stork in the fable invited the fox to supper he served the bean soup in a long-necked vase. The stork had a beak that reached down the neck of the vase and drank the soup with ease. The fox had a short muzzle and couldn't get it. The trick made him mad and he bit the stork's head off. Why should the brain worker invite the manual worker to a confab and then serve the feast in such long-necked language that the laborer can't get it? “Let's spill the beans,” the agitator tells him, “then we'll all get some of the gravy.”

This long-necked jargon must go. It is not the people's dish. With foggy phrases that no one really understands they are trying to incite the hand worker to bite off the head of the brain worker. When employer and employee sit together at the council table, let the facts be served in such simple words that we can all get our teeth into them.

When I became secretary of labor I said that the employer and employee had a duty to perform one to the other, and both to the public.

Capital does not always mean employer. When I was a boy in Sharon, Pennsylvania, I looked in a pool in the brook and discovered a lot of fish. I broke some branches off a tree, and with this I brushed the fish out of the pool. I sold them to a teamster for ten cents. With this I bought shoe blacking and a shoe brush and spent my Saturdays blacking boots for travelers at the depot and the hotel. I had established a boot-blacking business which I pushed in my spare time for several years. My brush and blacking represented my capital. The shining of the travelers' shoes was labor. I was a capitalist but not an employer; I was a laborer but not an employee.

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” said Lincoln. This is true. I labored to break the branches from the tree before I had any capital. They brought me fish, which were capital because I traded them for shoe blacking with which I earned enough money to buy ten times more fish than I had caught.

So labor is prior to capital—when you use the words in their right meaning. But call the employee “labor” and the employer “capital,” and you make old Honest Abe say that the employee is prior to and independent of the employer, or that the wage earner is independent of the wage payer or, in still shorter words, the man is on the job before the job is created. Which is nonsense.

Capital does not always mean employer. A Liberty Bond is capital but it is not an employer; the Government is an employer but it is not capital, and when any one is arguing a case for an employee against his employer let him use the proper terms. The misuse of words can cause a miscarriage of justice as the misuse of railway signals can send a train into the ditch.

All my life I have been changing big words into little words so that the employee can know what the employer is saying to him. The working man handles things. The professional man plies words. I learned things first and words afterward. Things can enrich a nation, and words can impoverish it. The words of theorists have cost this nation billions which must be paid for in things.

When I was planning a great school for the education of orphans, some of my associates said: “Let us teach them to be pedagogues.” I said: “No, let us teach them the trades. A boy with a trade can do things. A theorist can say things. Things done with the hands are wealth, things said with the mouth are words. When the housing shortage is over and we find the nation suffering from a shortage of words, we will close the classes in carpentry and open a class in oratory.”

This, then is the introduction to my views and to my policies. They are now to have a fair trial, like that other iron worker in the Elwood police court. I know what the word “previous” means. I can give an account of myself. So, in the following pages I will tell “where I was before I came here.”

If my style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract problems of child education. A speaker must entertain his hearers to the end or lose their attention. And so I taxed my wit to make this subject simple and easy to listen to. At last I evolved a style of address that brought my points home to the men I was addressing.

After all these years I can not change my style. I talk more easily than I write; therefore, in composing this book I have imagined myself facing an audience, and I have told my story. I do not mention the names of the loyal men who helped work out the plans of Mooseheart and gave the money that established it, for their number is so great that their names alone would fill three volumes as large as this.

J.J.D.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Joseph G. Cannon

PREFACE


CHAPTER I.   THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES

CHAPTER II.   A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE

CHAPTER III.   NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES

CHAPTER IV.   SHE SINGS TO HER NEST

CHAPTER V.   THE LOST FEATHER BED

CHAPTER VI.   HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN

CHAPTER VII.   HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA

CHAPTER VIII.   MY FIRST REGULAR JOB

CHAPTER IX.   THE SCATTERED FAMILY

CHAPTER X.   MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY

CHAPTER XI.   KEEPING OPEN HOUSE

CHAPTER XII.   MY HAND TOUCHES IRON

CHAPTER XIII.   SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL

CHAPTER XIV.   BOILING DOWN THE PIGS

CHAPTER XV.   THE IRON BISCUITS

CHAPTER XVI.   WRESTING A PRIZE FROM NATURE'S HAND

CHAPTER XVII.   MAN IS IRON TOO

CHAPTER XVIII.   ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER

CHAPTER XIX.   I START ON MY TRAVELS

CHAPTER XX.   THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS

CHAPTER XXI.   ENVY IS THE SULPHUR IN HUMAN PIG-IRON

CHAPTER XXII.   LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE

CHAPTER XXIII.   THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION

CHAPTER XXIV.   JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN

CHAPTER XXV.   A DROP IN THE BUCKET OF BLOOD

CHAPTER XXVI.   A GRUB REFORMER PUTS US OUT OF GRUB

CHAPTER XXVII.   THE PIE EATER'S PARADISE

CHAPTER XXVIII.   CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP

CHAPTER XXIX.   A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM

CHAPTER XXX.   BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDUSTRY

CHAPTER XXXI.   UNACCUSTOMED AS I AM TO PUBLIC SPEAKING

CHAPTER XXXII.   LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH

CHAPTER XXXIII.   I MEET THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTAINS

CHAPTER XXXIV.   SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS

CHAPTER XXXV.   AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY

CHAPTER XXXVI.   GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES' BLOOD

CHAPTER XXXVII.   FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE

CHAPTER XXXVIII.   THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT

CHAPTER XXXIX.   PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN

CHAPTER XL.   FATHER TOOK ME SERIOUSLY

CHAPTER XLI.   A PAVING CONTRACTOR PUTS ME ON THE PAVING

CHAPTER XLII.   THE EVERLASTING MORALIZER

CHAPTER XLIII.   FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST

CHAPTER XLIV.   A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM

CHAPTER XLV.   THE DREAM COMES TRUE

CHAPTER XLVI.   THE MOOSEHEART IDEA

CHAPTER XLVII.   LIFE'S PROBLEMS

CHAPTER XLVIII.     BUILDING A BETTER WORLD BY EDUCATION

CHAPTER XLIX.   CONCLUSION

THE IRON PUDDLER

CHAPTER I. THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES

A fight in the first chapter made a book interesting to me when I was a boy. I said to myself, “The man who writes several chapters before the fighting begins is like the man who sells peanuts in which a lot of the shells haven't any goodies.” I made up my mind then that if I ever wrote a book I would have a fight in the first chapter.

So I will tell right here how I whipped the town bully in Sharon, Pennsylvania. I'll call him Babe Durgon. I've forgotten his real name, and it might be better not to mention it anyhow. For though I whipped him thirty years ago, he might come back now in a return match and reverse the verdict, so that my first chapter would serve better as my last one. Babe was older than I, and had pestered me from the time I was ten. Now I was eighteen and a man. I was a master puddler in the mill and a musician in the town band (I always went with men older than myself). Two stove molders from a neighboring factory were visiting me that day, and, as it was dry and hot, I offered to treat them to a cool drink. There were no soda fountains in those days and the only place to take a friend was to the tavern. We went in and my companions ordered beer. Babe, the bully, was standing by the bar. He had just come of age, and wanted to bulldoze me with that fact.

“Don't serve Jimmy Davis a beer,” Babe commanded. “He's a minor. He can't buy beer.”

“I didn't want a beer,” I said. “I was going to order a soft drink.”

“Yes, you was. Like hell you was,” Babe taunted. “You came in here to get a beer like them fellers. You think you're a man, but I know you ain't. And I'm here to see that nobody sells liquor to a child.”

I was humiliated. The bully knew that I wanted to be a man, and his shot stung me. My friends looked at me as if to ask: “Are you going to take that?” And so the fight was arranged, although I had no skill at boxing, and was too short-legged, like most Welshmen, for a fast foot race. Babe had me up against a real problem.

“Come on over the line,” he said.

Sharon was near the Ohio border and it was customary to go across the state line to fight, so that on returning the local peace officers would have no jurisdiction. We started for the battle ground. Babe had never been whipped; he always chose younger opponents. He was a good gouger, and had marked up most of the boys on the “flats” as we called the lowlands where the poorer working people lived. A gouger is one who stabs with his thumb. When he gets his sharp thumb-nail into the victim's eye, the fight is over. Biting and kicking were his second lines of attack.

As we walked along I was depressed by the thought that I was badly outclassed. There was only one thing in my favor. I hated Babe Durgon with a bitter loathing that I had been suppressing for years. It all went back to the summer of 1884 when I was eleven years old. Times were hard, and the mill was “down.” Father had gone to Pittsburgh to look for work. I was scouring the town of Sharon to pick up any odd job that would earn me a nickel. There were no telephones and I used to carry notes between sweethearts, pass show bills for the “opry,” and ring a hand-bell for auctions. An organized charity had opened headquarters on Main Street to collect clothing and money for the destitute families of the workers. I went up there to see if they needed an errand boy. A Miss Foraker—now Mrs. F. H. Buhl—was in charge. She was a sweet and gracious young woman and she explained that they had no pay-roll.

“Everybody works for nothing here,” she said. “I get no pay, and the landlord gives us the use of the rooms free. This is a public charity and everybody contributes his services free.”

I saw a blue serge boy's suit among the piles of garments. It was about my size and had seen little wear. I thought it was the prettiest suit I had ever seen. I asked Miss Foraker how much money it would take to buy the suit. She said nothing was for sale. She wrapped up the suit and placed the package in my arms, saying, “That's for you, Jimmy.”

I raced home and climbed into the attic of our little four-dollar-a-month cottage, and in the stifling heat under the low roof I changed my clothes. Then I proudly climbed down to show my blue suit to my mother. “Where did you get those clothes, James?” she asked gravely.

I told her about Miss Foraker.

“Did you work for them?”

“No; everything is free,” I said.

Mother told me to take the suit off. I went to the attic, blinking a tear out of my eyes, and changed into my old rags again. Then mother took the blue suit, wrapped it up carefully and putting it in my hands told me to take it back to Miss Foraker.

“You don't understand, James,” she said. “But these clothes are not for people like us. These are to be given to the poor.”

I have often smiled as I looked back on it. I'll bet there wasn't a dime in the house. The patches on my best pants were three deep and if laid side by side would have covered more territory than the new blue suit. To take those clothes back was the bitterest sacrifice my heart has ever known.

A few days later there was a fire sale by one of the merchants, and I got the job of ringing the auction bell. Late in the afternoon the auctioneer held up a brown overcoat. “Here is a fine piece of goods, only slightly damaged,” he said. He showed the back of the coat where a hole was burned in it. “How much am I offered?”

I knew that I would get fifty cents for my day's work, so I bid ten cents—all that I could spare.

“Sold,” said the auctioneer, “for ten cents to the kid who rang the bell all day.”

I took the garment home and told my mother how I had bought it for cash in open competition with all the world. My mother and my aunt set to work with shears and needles and built me a suit of clothes out of the brown overcoat. It took a lot of ingenuity to make the pieces come out right. The trousers were neither long nor short. They dwindled down and stopped at my calves, half-way above my ankles. What I hated most was that the seams were not in the right places. It was a patchwork, and there were seams down the front of the legs where the crease ought to be. I didn't want to wear the suit, but mother said it looked fine on me, and if she said so I knew it must be true. I wore it all fall and half the winter.

The first time I went to Sunday-school, I met Babe Durgon. He set up the cry:

This was the first time that my spirit had been hurt. His words were a torment that left a scar upon my very soul. Even to this day when I awake from some bad dream, it is a dream that I am wearing crazy breeches and all the world is jeering at me. It has made me tender toward poor children who have to wear hand-me-downs.

To-day psychologists talk much of the “inferiority complex” which spurs a man forward to outdo himself. But Babe Durgon and I didn't go into these matters as we trudged along through the dark on our way to do battle “over the line.” At the foot of the hill, Babe exclaimed:

“What's the use of going any farther? Let's fight here.” It was in front of a new building—a church-school half completed. We took off our coats and made belts of our suspenders. Then we squared off and the fight began. Babe rushed me like a wild boar and tried to thrust his deadly thumb into my eye. I threw up my head and his thumb gashed my lips and went into my mouth. The impact almost knocked me over, but my teeth had closed on his thumb and when he jerked back he put me on my balance again. I clouted him on the jaw and knocked him down. He landed in the lime box. The school had not yet been plastered, and the quicklime was in an open pit. I started in after the bully, but stopped to save my pants from the lime. There was a hose near by, and I turned the water on Babe in the lime bath. The lime completely covered him. He was whipped and in fear of his life. Choking and weeping he hollered, “Nuff.” We got him out, too weak to stand, and gently leaned him up in a corner of the school building. There we left the crushed bully and returned to town. But before I went I gave him this parting shot:

“Do you know why I licked you, Babe? It wasn't what you said in the tavern that made me mad. I didn't want a glass of beer, and you were right in saying I was a minor. Where you made your mistake was when you made fun of my breeches, seven years ago. And do you remember that blue suit you had on at the time? I know where you got that blue suit of clothes, and I know who had it before you got it. If you still think that a bully in charity clothes can make fun of a boy in clothes that he earned with his own labor, just say so, and I'll give you another clout that will finish you.”

All bullies, whether nations, parties or individuals, get licked in the same way. They outrage some one's self-respect, and then the old primordial cyclone hits them.

CHAPTER II. A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE

My family is Welsh, and I was born in Tredegar, Wales. David and Davies are favorite names among the Welsh, probably because David whipped Goliath, and mothers named their babies after the champion. The Welsh are a small nation that has always had to fight against a big nation. The idea that David stopped Goliath seemed to reflect their own national glory. The ancient invasions that poured across Britain were stopped in Wales, and they never could push the Welshmen into the sea.

The Welsh pride themselves on hanging on. They are a nation that has never been whipped. Every people has its characteristics. “You can't beat the Irish” is one slogan, “You can't kill a Swede” is another, and “You can't crowd out a Welshman” is a motto among the mill people.

I didn't want to leave Wales when my parents were emigrating. Though I was not quite eight years old I decided I would let them go without me. The last act of my mother was to reach under the bed, take hold of my heels and drag me out of the house feet first. I tried to hang on to the cracks in the floor, and tore off a few splinters to remember the old homestead by. I never was quite satisfied with that leave-taking, and nearly forty years later when I had car fare, I went back to that town. I never like to go out of a place feet first, and I cleared my record this time by walking out of my native village, head up and of my own free will.

On that trip I paid a visit to the home of Lloyd George in Cricuth. Joseph Davies, one of the war secretaries to the prime minister, invited me to dinner and we talked of the American form of government. (Note the spelling of Davies. It is the Welsh spelling. When my father signed his American naturalization papers he made his mark, for he could not read nor write. The official wrote in his name, spelling it Davis and so it has remained.) “You have this advantage,” said Mr. Davies. “Your president is secure in office for four years and can put his policies through. Our prime minister has no fixed term and may have to step out at any minute.”

“Yes,” I replied jokingly, “but your prime minister this time is a Welshman.”

Since then four years have passed and our president is out. But Lloyd George is still there (1922). And he'll still be there, for all I know, until he is carried out feet first. The instinct of a Welshman is to hang on.

These things teach us that racial characteristics do not change. In letting immigrants into this country we must remember this. Races that have good traits built up good countries there abroad and they will in the same way build up the country here. Tribes that have swinish traits were destroyers there and will be destroyers here. This has been common knowledge so long that it has become a proverb: “You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.”

Proverbs are the condensed wisdom of the ages. Life has taught me that the wisdom of the ages is the truth. The Proverbs and the Ten Commandments answer all our problems. My mother taught them to me when I was a child in Wales. I have gone out and tasted life, and found her words true. Starting at forge and furnace in the roaring mills, facing facts instead of books, I have been schooled in life's hard lessons. And the end of it all is the same as the beginning: the Proverbs,—the Commandments,—and the Golden Rule.

CHAPTER III. NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES

From my father I learned many things. He taught me to be skilful and proud of it. He taught me to expect no gift from life, but that what I got I must win with my hands. He taught me that good men would bring forth good fruits. This was all the education he could give me, and it was enough.

My father was an iron worker, and his father before him. My people had been workers in metal from the time when the age of farming in Wales gave way to the birth of modern industries. They were proud of their skill, and the secrets of the trade were passed from father to son as a legacy of great value, and were never told to persons outside the family. Such skill meant good wages when there was work. But there was not work all the time. Had there been jobs enough for all we would have taught our trade to all. But in self-protection we thought of our own mouths first. All down the generations my family has been face to face with the problem of bread.

My Grandfather Davies, held a skilled job at the blast furnace where iron was made for the rolling mill in which my father was a puddler. Grandfather Davies had been to Russia and had helped the Russians build blast furnaces, in the days when they believed that work would make them wealthy. Had they stuck to that truth they would not be a ruined people to-day. Grandfather also went to America, where his skill helped build the first blast furnace in Maryland. The furnace fires have not ceased burning here, and Russia is crying for our steel to patch her broken railways. Her own hills are full of iron and her hands are as strong as ours. Let them expect no gift from life.

Grandfather told my father that America offered a rich future for him and his boys. “The metal is there,” he said, “as it is in Russia. Russia may never develop, but America will. A nation's future lies not in its resources. The American mind is right. Go to America.”

And because my father believed that a good people will bring forth good fruit, he left his ancient home in Wales and crossed the sea to cast his lot among strangers.

I started to school in Wales when I was four years old. By the time I was six I thought I knew more than my teachers. This shows about how bright I was. The teachers had forbidden me to throw paper wads, or spitballs. I thought I could go through the motion of throwing a spitball without letting it go. But it slipped and I threw the wad right in the teacher's eye. I told him it was an accident, that I had merely tried to play smart and had overreached myself.

“Being smart is a worse fault,” he said, “than throwing spitballs. I forgive you for throwing the spitball, but I shall whip the smart Aleckness out of you.”

He gave me a good strapping, and I went home in rebellion. I told my father. I wanted him to whip the teacher. Father said:

“I know the teacher is a good man. I have known him for years, and he is honest, he is just, he is kind. If he whipped you, you deserved it. You can not see it that way, so I am going to whip you myself.”

He gave me a good licking, and, strange to say, it convinced me that he and the teacher were right. They say that the “hand educates the mind,” and I can here testify that father's hand set my mental processes straight. From that day I never have been lawless in school or out. The shame of my father's disapproval jolted me so that I decided ever after to try to merit his approval.

To-day there is a theory that the child ought never to be restrained. Solomon said: “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” We have no corporal punishment at Mooseheart, but we have discipline. A child must be restrained. Whenever a crop of unrestrained youngsters takes the reins I fear they will make this country one of their much talked of Utopias. It was an unrestricted bunch that made a “Utopia” out of Russia.

Anyhow, my father lived his life according to his simple rules. He is living to-day, a happy man in the cozy home he won, by his own work. The things he taught me I have seen tested in his long life, proved true. He never expected any gift from life. I thought once to surprise him. I wanted to buy a fine house and give it to him. He wouldn't have it. He stayed in his own little cottage. It was not in his theory of life that a house should come to him as a gift. It was a sound theory, and like a true Welshman, he hangs on to it to the end. He is a good man, and the fruits that his life of labor has brought forth are good fruits.

CHAPTER IV. SHE SINGS TO HER NEST

From my mother I learned to sing. She was always working and always singing. There were six children in the house, and she knitted and sewed and baked and brewed for us all. I used to toddle along at her side when she carried each day the home-made bread and the bottle of small beer for father's dinner at the mill. I worshiped my mother, and wanted to be like her. And that's why I went in for singing. I have sung more songs in my life than did Caruso. But my voice isn't quite up to his! So my singing has brought me no returns other than great chunks of personal satisfaction. The satisfaction was not shared by my hearers, and so I have quit. But my heart still sings, and always will. And this I owe to my mother.

I can see her yet in our tiny Welsh cottage, her foot on a wooden cradle rocking a baby, my baby brother, her hands busy with her knitting, her voice lifted in jubilant song for hours at a time. And all her songs were songs of praise.

She thanked God for life and for strong hands to labor for her little ones. In those days furniture was rare, and few were the pieces in a worker's home. It took a dozen years for her to acquire two feather beds. And when at last we owned two bedsteads, we rated ourselves pretty rich. We boys slept five in a bed. Why were bedsteads in those days harder to get than automobiles are to-day? Because the wooden age still lingered, the age of hand work. And it took so long to make a bed by hand that people came into the world faster than beds. But within my lifetime the iron mills have made possible the dollar bedstead. The working man can fill his house with beds bought with the wage he earns in half a week. This, I suppose, is one of the “curses of capitalism.”

I have heard how “the rights of small peoples” have been destroyed by capitalism; and if the right to sleep five in a bed was prized by the little folks, this privilege has certainly been taken away from them. At the Mooseheart School we are pinched for sleeping room for our fast-growing attendance. I suggested that, for the time being, we might double deck the beds like the berths in a sleeping car. “No,” cried the superintendent. “Not in this age do we permit the crowding of children in their sleeping quarters.” So this is the slavery that capitalism has driven us to; we are forced to give our children more comforts than we had ourselves. When I was sleeping five in a bed with my brothers, there was one long bolster for five hot little faces. The bolster got feverish and a boy sang out: “Raise up.” We lifted our tired heads. “Turn over.” Two boys turned the bolster. “Lie down.” And we put our faces on the cool side and went to sleep.

Those were not hardships, and life was sweet, and we awoke from our crowded bed, like birds in a nest awakened by their mother's morning song. For, as I have said, my mother was always singing. Her voice was our consolation and delight.

One of the most charming recollections of my boyhood is that of my mother standing at our gate with a lamp in her hands, sending one boy out in the early morning darkness, to his work, and at the same time welcoming another boy home. My brother was on the day shift and I on the night, which meant that he left home as I was leaving the mills, about half past two in the morning. On dark nights—and they were all dark at that hour—my mother, thinking my little brother afraid, would go with him to the gate and, holding an old-fashioned lamp high in her hands, would sing some Welsh song while he trudged out toward the mills and until he got within the radius of the glare from the stacks as they. belched forth the furnace flames. And as he passed from the light of the old oil burner into the greater light from the mills, I walked wearily out from that reflection and was guided home by my mother's lamp and song on her lips.

Happy is the race that sings, and the Welsh are singers. After the tiring labor in the mills we still had joy that found its voice in song. When I was six years old I joined a singing society. The whole land of Wales echoes with the folk songs of a people who sing because they must.

The memory of my mother singing, has made my whole life sweet. When blue days came for me, and hardship almost forced me to despair, I turned my thoughts to her, singing as she rocked a cradle, and from her spirit my own heart took hope again. I think the reason I have never cared for drink is this: the ease from mental pain that other men have sought in alcohol, I always found in song.