I didn't care very much for day school. The whipping that I got there rather dulled the flavor of it for me. But I was a prize pupil at Sunday-school. Father had gone to America and had saved enough money to send for the family. I asked my mother if there were Sunday-schools in America, but she did not know. In those days we knew little about lands that lay so far away.
My boy chums told me we were going to Pennsylvania to fight Indians. This cheered me up. Fighting Indians would be as much fun as going to Sunday-school. A trip to America for such a purpose was a sensible move. But when mother exploded the Indian theory and said we were going to work in a rolling mill, I decided that it was a foolish venture.
This shows how much my judgment was worth. I thought it foolish to go to America merely to better our condition. But I thought it a wise move to go there and kill Indians to better the living conditions of the Americans. I know grown men to-day with the same kind of judgment. They are unwilling to do the simple things that will save their own scalps; but they are glad to go fight imaginary Indians who they believe are scalping the human race. “Capitalism” is one of these imaginary Indians. And Lenin and Trotsky are the boy Indian-fighters of the world. These poor children are willing to go to any country to help kill the Indian of capitalism. Meanwhile their own people are the poorest in the world, but they do nothing to better their condition. Such men have minds that never grew up.
When our household was dissolving and we were packing our baggage for America, I tried to break up the plan by hiding under the bed. Mother took the feather ticks off the two bedsteads and bundled them up to take to America. Then she reached under the bedstead and pulled me out by the heels. She sold the bedsteads to a neighbor. And so our household ended in Wales and we were on our way to establish a new one in a far country.
As I said before, the feather beds were mother's measure of wealth. Before she was married she had begun saving for her first feather bed. It had taken a long time to acquire these two tickfuls of downy goose feathers. The bed is the foundation of the household. It is there that the babies are born. There sleep restores the weary toiler that he may rise and toil anew. And there at last when work is done, the old folks fall into a sleep that never ends.
We traveled steerage to Castle Garden. Having passed the immigrant tests, we found ourselves set out on the dock, free to go where we pleased. But our baggage had disappeared. Some one had made off with our precious feather beds!
This was the first real tragedy of my mother's life. All the joy of setting foot in the new land was turned to dismay. The stored-up pleasure with which she awaited the greeting of her husband was dashed in a moment, like sweet water flung upon the ground. When I saw the anguish in my mother's face, I was sobered to life's responsibilities. The song had died out of her heart, and I must make it sing again. While she was crying in distraction, I wrapped my own tearful face in her skirts and prayed to God that I might grow up in a day—that He would make my arms strong so I could go to work at once earning money to replace the lost feather beds. I was then not quite eight years old. It was early in April, 1881. Before the month was out I had found a job in the new country and was earning money. I gave all my earnings to my mother. I have been earning money ever since. As long as I lived at home I turned over all my wages to my mother. When I went away I sent her weekly a percentage of my earnings. This I have ever continued to do.
My love for my mother and her grief at the loss of the feather beds turned a careless boy into a serious money-maker. This led to the study of economics and finance. A man's destiny is often made by trifles light as feathers.
The loss of our baggage was only the beginning of our troubles in New York. With the feather ticks went also the money mother had got from selling the bedsteads and other furniture. She had nothing with which to buy food and while we were walking the streets we smelt the delicious odor of food from the restaurants and became whining and petulant. This was the first time mother had ever heard her children crying for bread when she had none to give them. The experience was trying, but her stout heart faced it calmly. In the Old World, her folks and father's folks had been rated as prosperous people. They always had good food in the larder and meat on Sunday, which was more than many had. They were the owners of feather beds, while many never slept on anything but straw. True they could not raise the passage money to America until father came and earned it—that would have been riches in Wales. Now we were in America hungry and penniless, and hard was the bed that we should lie on.
From Pittsburgh father had sent us railroad tickets, and these tickets were waiting for us at the railroad office. All we would have to do would be to hold our hunger in check until we should reach Hubbard, Ohio, where a kinsman had established a home. But while mother was piloting her family to the depot, two of the children got lost. She had reached Castle Garden with six children and her household goods. Now her goods were gone and only four of the children remained. My sister was ten and I was eight; we were the oldest. The baby, one year old, and the next, a toddler of three, mother had carried in her arms. But two boys, Walter and David, four and six years old, had got lost in the traffic. Mother took the rest of us to a hotel and locked us in a room while she went out to search for the missing ones. For two days she tramped the streets visiting police stations and making inquiry everywhere. At night she would return to us and report that she had found no trace of little Walter and David. To try to picture the misery of those scenes is beyond me. I can only say that the experience instilled in me a lasting terror. The fear of being parted from my parents and from my brothers and sisters, then implanted in my soul, has borne its fruit in after-life.
Finally mother found the boys in a rescue home for lost children. Brother David, curly-haired and red-cheeked, had so appealed to the policeman who found them that he had made application to adopt the boy and was about to take him to his own home.
After finding the children, mother stood on Broadway and, gazing at the fine buildings and the good clothes that all classes wore in America, she felt her heart swell with hope. And she said aloud: “This is the place for my boys.”
Every one had treated her with kindness. A fellow countryman had lent her money to pay the hotel bill, telling her she could pay it back after she had joined her husband. And so we had passed through the gateway of the New World as thousands of other poor families had done. And our temporary hardships had been no greater than most immigrants encountered in those days.
I later learned from a Bohemian of the trials his mother met with on her first days in New York. He told me that she and her three children, the smallest a babe in arms, tramped the streets of New York for days looking in vain for some one who could speak their native tongue. They slept at night in doorways, and by day wandered timid and terrified through the streets.
“At last a saloon-keeper saw that we were famishing,” the Bohemian told me. “He was a—a—Oh, what do you call them in your language? I can think of the Bohemian word but not the English.”
“What was he like?” I asked to help find the word. “Red-headed? Tall? Fat?”
“No; he was one of those people who usually run clothing stores and are always having a 'SALE.'”
“Jew,” I said.
“Yes, he was a Jew saloon-keeper. He took pity on us and took us into his saloon and gave us beer, bread and sausages. We were so nearly starved that we ate too much and our stomachs threw it up. The saloon-keeper sent word to the Humane Society, and they came and put us on the train for Chicago, where our father was waiting for us.”
The Bohemians saved from starvation by the pity of a Jewish saloon-keeper is a sample of how our world was running fifty years ago. Who can doubt that we have a better world to-day? And the thing that has made it better is the thing that Jew exhibited, human sympathy.
When I found myself head of the Labor Department one of my earliest duties was to inspect the immigrant stations at Boston and New York. In spite of complaints, they were being conducted to the letter of the law; to correct the situation it was only necessary to add sympathy and understanding to the enforcement of the law.
An American poet in two lines told the whole truth about human courage:
Tenderness and human sympathy to the alien passing through Ellis Island does not mean that we are weak, or that the unfit alien is welcome. The tenderer we treat the immigrant who seeks our hospitality, the harder will we smash him when he betrays us. That's what “the bravest are the tenderest” means. He who is tenderest toward the members of his household is bravest in beating back him who would destroy that house.
For example, I received a hurry-up call for more housing at Ellis Island in the early days of my administration. The commissioner told me he had five hundred more anarchists than he had roofs to shelter.
“Have these anarchists been duly convicted?” I asked.
He said they had been, and were awaiting deportation.
I told the commissioner not to worry about finding lodging for his guests; they would be on their way before bedtime.
“But there is no ship sailing so soon,” he said. “They will have to have housing till a ship sails.”
Now this country has a shortage of houses and a surplus of ships. There aren't enough roofs to house the honest people, and there are hundreds of ships lying idle. Let the honest people have the houses, and the anarchists have the ships. I called up the Shipping Board, borrowed a ship, put the Red criminals aboard and they went sailing, sailing, over the bounding main, and many a stormy wind shall blow “ere Jack come home again.”
On the other hand I discovered a family that had just come to America and was about to be deported because of a technicality. The family consisted of a father and mother and four small children. The order of deportation had been made and the family had been put aboard a ship about to sail. I learned that the children were healthy and right-minded; the mother was of honest working stock with a faith in God and not in anarchy. I had been one of such a family entering this port forty years ago. Little did I dream then that I would ever be a member of a President's Cabinet with power to wipe away this woman's tears and turn her heart's sorrowing into a song of joy. I wrote the order of admission, and the family was taken from the departing ship just before it sailed. I told the mother that the baby in her arms might be secretary of labor forty years hence.
It had been our plan to go from New York to Pittsburgh, but the mill that father was working in had shut down. And so he had sent us tickets to Hubbard, Ohio, where his brother had a job as a muck roller—the man who takes the bloom from the squeezer and throws it into the rollers. That's all I can tell you now. In later chapters I shall take you into a rolling mill, and show you how we worked. I believe I am the first puddler that ever described his job, for I have found no book by a puddler in any American library. But I wanted to explain here that a muck roller is not a muck raker, but a worker in raw iron.
When we boarded the train for Ohio, mother had nothing to look after except the six children. When the porter asked her where her baggage was, she smiled sadly and said that was a question for a wiser head than hers to answer. She was glad enough to have all her babies safe. Everything we owned was on our backs. Our patient father had toiled for months in Pittsburgh and had sent us nearly every cent to pay our transportation from the Old World. Now he was out of a job, and we were coming to him without as much as a bag of buns in our hands.
Before leaving New York, I want to tell what kind of city it was in those days.
In a recent magazine article a writer picturing our arrival at Castle Garden said that we “climbed the hill into Broadway and gazed around at the highest buildings we had ever seen.” But there were no tall buildings in New York at that time. The spires of Trinity Church and St. Paul's towered above everything. And we had seen such churches in the Old Country. Brooklyn Bridge had just been built and it overtopped the town like a syrup pitcher over a plate of pancakes. The tallest business blocks were five or six stories high, and back in Wales old Lord Tredegar, the chief man of our shire, lived in a great castle that was as fine as any of them.
The steel that made New York a city in the sky was wrought in my own time. My father and his sons helped puddle the iron that has braced this city's rising towers. A town that crawled now stands erect. And we whose backs were bent above the puddling hearths know how it got its spine. A mossy town of wood and stone changed in my generation to a towering city of glittering glass and steel. “All of which”—I can say in the words of the poet—“all of which I saw and part of which I was.”
The train that was taking us to Ohio was an Erie local, and the stops were so numerous that we thought we should never get there. A man on the train bought ginger bread and pop and gave us kids a treat. It has been my practice ever since to do likewise for alien youngsters that I meet on trains.
When we reached Hubbard, father met us and took us to an uncle's. We did not stop to wash the grime of travel from our faces until after we had filled our stomachs. Once refreshed with food, our religion returned to us, in the desire to be clean and to establish a household. I learned then that food is the first thing in the world. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but food is ahead of them all, and without food man loses his cleanliness, godliness and everything else worth having. When I wish to sound out a man, I ask him if he has ever been hungry. If I find he has never missed a meal in his life, I know his education has been neglected. For I believe that experience is the foremost teacher. I have learned something from every experience I ever had, and I hold that Providence has been kind to me in favoring me with a lot of rather tough adventures.
Our hardships on entering America taught me sympathy and filled me with a desire to help others. I have heard aliens say that America had not treated them with hospitality, and that this had made them bitter, and now these aliens would take revenge by tearing down America. This is a lie that can not fool me. My hardships did not turn me bitter. And I know a thousand others who had harder struggles than I. And none of them showed the yellow streak. The Pilgrim Fathers landed in the winter when there were no houses. Half of them perished from hardship in a single year. Did they turn anarchists?
The man who says that hard sledding in America made a yellow cur out of him fools no one. He was born a yellow cur. Hard sledding in America produced the man who said: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”
We stayed a week with father's brother in Hubbard. Then we went to Sharon, Pennsylvania, where father had a temporary job. A Welshman, knowing his desperate need of money, let him take his furnace for a few days and earn enough money to move on to Pittsburgh. There father found a job again, but mother was dissatisfied with the crowded conditions in Pittsburgh. She wanted to bring up her boys amid open fields.
In those days the air was black with soot and the crowded quarters where the workers lived offered no room for gardens. Mother wanted sunlight and green grass such as we had about Tredegar. There Lord Tredegar had his beautiful castle in the midst of a park. On certain days this great park was open to the villagers, and the children came to picnic, and Lord Tredegar gave them little cakes and tea in doll-size cups. Doubtless he looked upon us as “my people.”
But the lords of steel in Pittsburgh were too new at the game to practice the customs of the nobility in beautifying their surroundings. The mills had made things ugly and the place was not what mother thought it ought to be for bringing up children. So father took us back to Sharon, and there we had sunlight and grass and trees. We rented a neat little company-house with a big garden in the rear, where we raised enough potatoes to supply our table. There were window boxes filled with morning-glories, and lilacs grew in the yard. They company had planted those lilacs to nourish the souls of the worker's children. They gave me joy, and that is why the Mooseheart grounds are filled with lilac bushes.
As soon as we landed in Sharon I started out to earn money. Those feather beds were on my mind and I couldn't rest easy until we should replace them. Neither could the rest of the family. I have often told how I scraped up some capital and invested it in a shoe-shining outfit. Nearly every traveling man who came to the hotel allowed me to shine his shoes. The townsfolk let their shoes go gray all week, but the gay commercial travelers all were dudes and dressed like Sunday every day. They brought the new fashions to town and were looked upon as high-toned fellows. Their flashy get-up caught the girls, which made the town-boys hate them. But I liked them very well because they brought me revenue. “Where a man's treasure is, there is his heart also,” says the proverb, and my experience proved it true. On my first visit to the hotel I got acquainted with the landlord and he put me on his pay-roll. Behind the hotel was a cow pen where the milk for the guests was drawn fresh from the cows. The cows had to be driven to a pasture in the morning and back at night. I got a dollar and a quarter a month for driving the cows. And so I had found a paying job within thirty days after landing in America. The cost of pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. That was less than four cents a day for cow feed to produce two gallons of milk, or about two cents a gallon. The wages of the girls who milked them and my wages for driving them amounted to three cents a gallon. In other words, the cost of labor in getting the milk from the cows more than doubled the cost of the milk. This was my first lesson in political economy. I learned that labor costs are the chief item in fixing the price of anything.
The less labor used in producing milk, the cheaper the milk will be. The reason wages were high in America was because America was the land of labor-saving machinery. Little labor was put on any product, and so the product was cheap, like the landlord's milk. In the iron industry, for instance, the coal mines and iron ore lay near the mills, as the landlord's pasture was near his hotel. To bring the coal and ore to the blast furnaces took little labor, just as my driving in the cows cost the landlord but four cents a day. Next to the blast furnaces stood the mixer, the Bessemer open hearth furnaces, the ingot stripper building, the soaking pits and then the loading yards with their freight cars where the finished product in the form of wire, rails or sky-scraper steel is shipped away.
Because the landlord had his cows milked at the back door of his hotel the milk was still warm when it was carried into his kitchen. And so the steel mills are grouped so closely that a single heat sometimes carries the steel from the Bessemer hearth through all the near-by machines until it emerges as a finished product and is loaded on the railroad cars while it is still warm. It was this saving of labor and fuel that made American steel the cheapest steel in the world. And that's why the wages of steel and iron workers in America are the highest in the world.
Father was in the mills getting these good wages, though no puddler was ever paid for all the work he does, and all of us young Davises were eager to grow up so that we could learn the trade and get some of that good money ourselves. My hands itched for labor, and I wanted nothing better than to be big enough to put a finger in this industry that was building up America before my very eyes. I have always been a doer and a builder, it was in my blood and the blood of my tribe, as it is born in the blood of beavers. When I meet a man who is a loafer and a destroyer, I know he is alien to me. I fear him and all his breed. The beaver is a builder and the rat is a destroyer; yet they both belong to the rodent race. The beaver harvests his food in the summer; he builds a house and stores that food for the winter. The rat sneaks to the food stores of others: he eats what he wants and ruins the rest and then runs and hides in his hole. He lives in the builder's house, but he is not a builder. He undermines that house; he is a rat.
Some men are by nature beavers, and some are rats; yet they all belong to the human race. The people that came to this country in the early days were of the beaver type and they built up America because it was in their nature to build. Then the rat-people began coming here, to house under the roof that others built. And they try to undermine and ruin it because it is in their nature to destroy. They call themselves anarchists.
A civilization rises when the beaver-men outnumber the rat-men. When the rat-men get the upper hand the civilization falls. Then the rats turn and eat one another and that is the end. Beware of breeding rats in America.
For three years after we came to Sharon I went to school, and in my spare time worked at my shoe shining and other odd jobs. We had bought feather beds again and our little home was a happy one. By hanging around the depot spotting traveling men who needed a shine, or their grips carried, I got acquainted with the telegraph agent. And so I got the job of telegraph messenger boy.
Few telegrams were sent, and then only when somebody died. So whenever I carried a telegram I knew that I was the bearer of bad news. Accidents happened in the mines and iron mills. And when a man was killed, it often meant his wife and babies would face hunger, for the jobs were not the kind for women and children; muscular men were needed. Aside from the occupation of housewife, there was nothing for a woman to do in those days except to take in washing or sewing.
Of the many death messages that I bore to the workers' homes in Sharon, few found a home that was able to last a day after the burial of the bread-winner. He had failed to make provision for such an accident,—no savings in the bank, no life insurance. As soon as the worker was stricken his children were at the mercy of the world. I saw so much of this, that the pity of it entered deep into my boy-heart and never afterward could I forget it.
I talked with the station agent, the banker and the hotel keeper. The station agent had money in the bank which he was saving to educate his boy to be a telegrapher. He also carried life insurance. “If I should die,” he said, “my wife would collect enough insurance to start a boarding-house. My boy would have money enough to learn a trade. Then he could get as good a job as I have.” The hotel keeper told me that if he should die his wife could run the hotel just the same, it being free of debt and earning enough money so that she could hire a man to do the work he had been doing. The banker owned bonds and if he died the bonds would go right on earning money for his children.
These men were capitalists and their future was provided for. Most of the mill-workers were only laborers, they had no capital and the minute their labors ended they were done for. The workers were kind-hearted, and when a fellow was killed in the mill or died of sickness they went to his widow and with tears in their eyes reached into their pockets and gave her what cash they had. I never knew a man to hang back when a collection for a widow was being taken. Contributions sometimes were as high as five dollars. It made a heartrending scene: the broken body of a once strong man lying under a white sheet; the children playing around and laughing (if they were too young to know what it meant); the mother frantic with the thought that her brood was now homeless; and the big grimy workers wiping their tears with a rough hand and putting silver dollars into a hat.
With this money and the last wages of the dead man, the widow paid for the funeral and sometimes bought a ticket to the home of some relative who would give her her “keep” in return for her labor in the house. Other relatives might each take one of the children “to raise,” who, thus scattered, seldom if ever got together again. When I became an iron worker there were several fellows in our union who didn't know whether they had a relative on earth. One of them, Bill Williams, said to me: “Jim, no wonder you're always happy. You've got so many brothers that there's always two of you together, whether it's playing in the band, on the ball nine or working at the furnace. If I had a brother around I wouldn't get the blues the way I do. I've got some brothers somewhere in this world, but I'll probably never know where they are.”
Then he told how his father had died when he was three years old. There were several children, and they were taken by relatives. He was sent to his grandmother, whose name was Williams. That was not his name. Before he was seven both his grandparents died and he was taken by a farmer who called him Bill. The farmer did not send him to school and he grew up barely able to write his name, Will Williams, which was not his real name. He didn't even know what his real name was.
“Probably my brothers are alive,” he said, “but what chance have I got of ever finding them when I don't know what the family name is. Maybe they've all got new names now like I have. Maybe I've met my own brothers and we never knew it. I'd give everything in the world, if I had it, to look into a man's face and know that he was my brother. It must be a wonderful feeling.”
These things are the tragedies of the poor. And although such a misfortune never happened to me, this problem stared me in the face when I began carrying those fatal telegrams. I tackled the problem with a boyish mind. I soon resolved it into these propositions:
When a laborer dies his little children are scattered to the winds. Brothers and sisters may never see one another again.
When a man with property dies, his children are kept together. Their future is made safe by the property.
Labor provides for to-day. Property provides for to-morrow.
That truth was driven into my mind when I saw one family after another scattered by the death of a laborer. A merchant in Sharon died, and his children, after the funeral, kept right on going to school. There was no doubting the truth of my rule: Labor makes the present day safe—but the present day only. Capital safeguards the future.
From that day on, I argued that we should buy a home and save a little every day for capital. It was our duty thus to protect ourselves, should our father die, against being scattered among strangers.
Every race gets a nickname in America. A Frenchman is a “frog,” a negro a “coon” and a Welshman a “goat.” All the schoolboys who were not Welsh delighted in teasing us by applying the uncomplimentary nickname. This once resulted at the Sharon operahouse, in turning a dramatic episode into a howling farce.
I was acting as a super in the sensational drama She, by H. Rider Haggard. Two Englishmen were penetrating the mysterious jungles of Africa, and I was their native guide and porter. They had me all blacked up like a negro minstrel, but this wasn't a funny show, it was a drama of mystery and terror. While I was guiding the English travelers through the jungle of the local stage, we penetrated into the land of the wall-eyed cannibals.
The cannibals captured me and prepared to eat me in full view of the audience while the Englishmen behind the trees looked on in horror. The cannibals, who were also supers led by an actor of the “troupe,” set up a hot pot to boil my bones in. I was bound hand and foot, while the cannibals, armed with spears, danced around me in a heathen ceremony, chanting a voodoo chant and reciting a rigmarole by which cannibals are supposed to make their human feast on a sacred rite. As they danced about me in a circle, they sang:
“Is it an ox? Him-yah, him-yah.” And they jabbed their spears into me. Some of the supers jabbed me pretty hard, among them Babe Durgon, who delighted in tormenting me.
“Is it a sheep? Him-yah, him-yah.” Again they jabbed me, and I was so mad I was cussing them under my breath.
“Is it a pig? Him-yah, him-yah.”
The audience was breathless with tense excitement.
“Is it a goat?”
The entire gallery broke into a whirlwind roar: “Yes! yes! He's a goat.”
Laughter rocked the audience. They all knew I was Welsh and saw the joke. The horror and suspense had been so great that when it broke with comic relief the house was really hysterical. It stopped the show.
I played supernumerary parts in many shows that winter including Richard III and other Shakespearean plays. At the battle of Bosworth field where Richard cries: “A horse, a horse; my kingdom for a horse,” the supers in the army were clattering their swords on the opposing shields in a great hubbub and shouting, “Hay, hay hay!” I was of a thrifty turn of mind, and said: “Hold on, boys. Don't order too much hay until we see whether he gets the horse or not.”
A hypnotist came to the opera-house and I volunteered to be hypnotized. He couldn't hypnotize me. I felt rather bad about it. I was out of the show. Later I learned that all of the “Perfessor's” best subjects came with him under salary, and the local boys who made good were faking like the professionals. The whole thing was a cheat and I had not caught on. I was too serious-minded to think of faking. But several of the boys took to it naturally, and among them was Babe Durgon, the bully. He could be hypnotized and I couldn't. But several years later I had the satisfaction of “hypnotizing” him myself, as I told about in my first chapter.
Although I always regarded myself as a humorist, the impression I made on my comrades was that of a serious and religious fellow. I quoted the Bible to them so often that they nicknamed me “the Welsh Parson.” I was the general errand boy of the town. Everybody knew me. And when there was a job of passing hand-bills for the operahouse, or ringing bells for auction sales, I always got the job. Every nickel that rolled loose in the town landed in my pocket and I took it home to mother. Mother was my idol and what she said was law. One night I heard the band playing and started down-town. Mother told me to be sure to be in bed by nine o'clock. I found that a minstrel show had been thrown out of its regular route by a flood and was playing our town unexpectedly. The stage hands knew me and passed me in. I was seeing a high-priced show for nothing. But when it came nine o'clock, I went home. I told my mother that I had walked out of the most gorgeous minstrel show. She asked me why and I told her because she wanted me to be in bed by nine o'clock.
“Why, Jimmy,” she said, “I wanted you to be in bed so you wouldn't be in bad company. It would have been all right for you to have stayed at the minstrel show. All I want to know is that you are in good company.”
I guess mother thought I was a bit soft, but I had seen the best part of the show, as in those days the curtain rose at seven forty-five.
Minstrel shows were the greatest delight of my youth. I learned to dance and could sing all the songs and get off the jokes. Dupree & Benedict's were the first minstrels I ever saw. I marched in their parade and carried the drum. George Evans (Honey Boy) was a life-long friend. We were born within three miles of each other in Wales and came to this country at about the same time.
Our little four-room company-house in Sharon had its doors open to the wayfarer. There was always some newcomer from Wales, looking for a stake in America, who had left his family in Wales. Usually he was a distant kinsman, but whether a blood relation or not, we regarded all Welshmen as belonging to our clan. Our house was small, but we crowded into the corners and made room for another. His food and bed were free as long as he stayed. We helped him find a job, and then he thanked us for our hospitality and went out of our house with our blessings upon him. This form of community life was the social law in all the cottages of the Welsh.
It was like the law of tobacco among Americans. Tobacco has always been “nationalized” in America, and so have matches. Your pipe is your own, but your tobacco and matches belong to everybody. So it was with food and shelter in the Welsh colony at Sharon. Each newcomer from the Old Country was entitled to free bed and board until he could get a job in the mills. When he found a job his money was his; we never expected him to pay for the food he had eaten any more than you would expect pay for the tobacco and matches you furnish your friends.
These sojourners in our family were heroes to us kids. They brought us news from the Old World, and each one had tricks or tales that were new to us. One man showed us that we could put our hand on the bottom of a boiling teakettle and find the bottom cool. Another told us about milking goats in the Old Country. We asked him how much milk a goat would give. He said, “About a thimbleful,” and we thought him very witty. Another had shipped as an “able seaman” to get his passage to America. When out at sea it was discovered he didn't know one rope from another. During a storm he and the mate had a terrible fight. “The sea was sweeping the deck and we were ordered to reef a shroud. I didn't know how, and the mate called me a name that no Welshman will stand for. I thought we were all going to be drowned anyhow, and I might as well die with my teeth in his neck. So I flew into him and we fought like wildcats. I couldn't kill him and he couldn't kill me. And the sea didn't sweep us overboard. But after that fight the mate let me do as I pleased for the rest of the voyage.”
Knowing how strong are the arms of an iron worker and what a burly man is a ship's mate, we realized that the fight must have been a struggle between giants.
We were fluent readers, much better readers than our parents, but we had no books. We took the Youth's Companion, and it was the biggest thing in our lives. Every week we were at the post-office when the Companion was due. We could hardly wait, we were so eager to see what happened next in the “continued” story. Surely so good a children's paper as the Youth's Companion could never be found in any country but America. America was the land of children, and that's why parents broke their old-home ties and made the hard pilgrimage to America; it was for the benefit of their children.
Our home was a happy one, for we children were fond of one another and all loved the father and mother who worked so hard for us. We were the first to realize that our home was insecure, upheld by a single prop, our father's labor. The breaking of his right arm might have broken up our home. We wanted to acquire property so that mother would be safe. For we knew that God was a just God. He did not ordain that one class should labor and be insecure while another class owned property and was safe. I learned that the banker, the hotel keeper and the station agent had all been poor boys like myself. They started with nothing but their hands to labor with. They had worked hard and saved a part of their wages, and this had given them “a start.” The hotel keeper had been a hack driver. He slept in the haymow of a livery stable. He had to meet the train that came at two o'clock in the morning. No other man was willing to have his sleep broken at such an hour. He hated to lose the sleep, but he wanted the money. At the end of four years he had saved a thousand dollars. He wanted to buy a hotel but needed more money. The banker, knowing he was a stayer, lent him the cash he needed, and so he became a property owner. He no longer slept in the haymow but had a room of his own and other rooms to rent to the “high-toned traveling men.”
From this I learned that laborers became capitalists when they saved their money. Right then I made up my mind that some day mother would own a home. If father couldn't save the money to buy it, I would. Years afterward a wealthy Pittsburgh man who had just built a fine residence in the fashionable section of that town found himself in difficulties and unable to occupy the house. He offered it to me at a bargain. So I took my parents to this place and told them it was to be theirs. Mother declared that she certainly never dreamed of having a “magnificent home like this.” She seemed to be greatly pleased. But now I know that the sparkle in her eyes was for me. Her boy had done all this for his mother. If I had given her a pair of shoes that pinched her feet, she would have worn them smiling for my sake. Father looked out the windows at the neighboring residences. “Who lives there?” he asked. “And who lives yonder?” I told him the great names of his neighbors.
“Son,” he said, “you do not wish to lock your parents up in a prison, do you?”
Then he explained: “We do not know these people. We are too old to make new friends. We would never be at ease here, we would be lonely. We like the little home that we bought with our own savings. It has become a part of ourselves; it fits us like the wrinkles on our faces. If we moved here our old friends would never come to see us. This magnificence would scare them away. No, son. We thank you for offering us this house, but it is not for us. We will stay in the little cottage where our old friends will be free to come and light a pipe and chat and drowse away the evening hours that yet remain.”
How wise he was! He knew the fitness of things. His simple comforts, his old friends, these he valued more than riches, and the valuation that he put upon them was the right one.
When I was eleven I got a regular job that paid me fifty cents a day. So I quit school just where the Monitor had sunk the Merrimac in the “first fight of the ironclads.” Thereafter my life was to be bound up with the iron industry. My job was in a nail factory. I picked the iron splinters from among the good nails that had heads on them. This taught me that many are marred in the making. Those that are born with bad heads must not be used in building a house or the house will fall. In the head of the nail is its power to hold fast. Men are like nails, some have the hold-fast will in their heads. Others have not. They were marred in the making. They must be thrown aside and not used in building the state, or the state will fall.
I put the good nails into kegs, and the headless nails and splinters were sent back to be melted into window weights. Handling sharp nails is hard on the hands. And the big half-dollar that I earned was not unmarred with blood. Every pay-day I took home my entire earnings and gave them to mother. All my brothers did the same. Mother paid the household expenses, bought our clothing and allotted us spending money and money for Sunday-school.
This is a cynical age and I can imagine that I hear somebody snicker when I confess the fondness I had for the Sunday-school. I don't want any one to think I am laying claim to the record of having always been a good little boy; nor that everything I did was wise. No; I confess I did my share of deviltry, that some of my deeds were foolish, and (to use the slang of that time) I often got it in the neck. Once I bantered a big fat boy to a fight. He chased me and I ran and crawled into a place so narrow that I knew he couldn't follow me. I crawled under the floor of a shed that was only about six inches above the ground. Fatty was at least ten inches thick and I thought I was safe. But he didn't try to crawl under the floor after me. He went inside the shed and found that the boards of the floor sank beneath his weight like spring boards. And there that human hippopotamus stood jumping up and down while he mashed me into the mud like a mole under a pile-driver. I had showed that I had “a head on me like a nail” when I crawled under that floor and let Fatty step on me. There is a saying, “You can't keep a good man down.” But Fatty kept me down, and so I must admit he was a better man than I was. Some people say you should cheer for the under-dog. But that isn't always fair. The under-dog deserves our sympathy, the upper-dog must be a better dog or he couldn't have put the other dog down. I give three cheers for the winner. Any tribe that adopts the rule of always hissing the winner has found a real way to discourage enterprise.
I owned a part interest in some pigeons with a boy named Jack Thomas. The pigeons' nests were in Jack's back yard. He told me that my share of the eggs had rotted and his share had hatched, so that my interest in the young pigeons had died out and they were all his now. I was sure it was a quibble and that he was cheating me. It made me mad and I sneaked up to the pigeon loft and put a tiny pin prick in all the eggs in the nests. This was invisible but it caused the eggs to rot as he said mine had, and I felt that this was only justice. Turn about is fair play.
When Jack's eggs didn't hatch he suspected me, for I had been so foolish as to predict that his eggs wouldn't hatch. And so he was sure I was responsible, although he didn't know how. In fact his mother had seen me enter the barn and had told Jack about it. One day when I went to the pasture to get the hotel keeper's cows, I ran into Jack hunting ground squirrels with his dog. He set his dog chasing the cows and then ran away out of my reach. The dog yelped at the cows heels and they galloped about the pasture in a panic. I shouted to Jack to call off his dog or there would be trouble the next time I met him. But Jack, who was out of reach, shouted encouragement instead. Round and round the cattle raced with that howling dog scaring them into fits. At last the dog tired of the fun and trotted off to join Jack, who was disappearing over the hill. I then tried to round up the cows and get them out of the pasture. But the brutes were wet with sweat and as wild as deer. I saw that they could not be milked in that condition and felt that Jack's conduct was outrageous. He had not only made trouble for me; he had injured the hotel keeper. There would be no milk that night fit to be used.
I started straight for Jack's home to tell his mother of his lawless act. As I went along, I turned the case over in my mind, and the case grew stronger and stronger all the time. Before I reached Jack's door I had, satisfied myself that his mother would be shocked at the news and would at once cut a big switch to give Jack the licking he deserved.
But when I began to tell Mrs. Thomas of her son's crime, she sided with Jack and wouldn't listen to me. “Don't come to me with your troubles, you nasty little whiffet,” she cried. “You started the whole thing when you sneaked in and ruined Jack's pigeon eggs. Now that you've got the worst of it you come here with your tattle-tales. You ought to be ashamed to show your face—” She had become so threatening that I turned and ran. My whole case had gone to pieces on her sharp tongue like a toy balloon pricked with a pin. I had been blowing it up until it got so big I couldn't see anything else. It burst right in my face, and there wasn't even a scrap of rubber to tell where it had been.
This taught me one of the best lessons I ever learned. By looking only at his side of a case a man can kid himself into thinking that he is wholly right, that his cause is greater than himself and represents the rights of the entire community. But a counter-blast from the other side will deflate his balloon in a second and he'll come down to earth without even a parachute to soften the jolt when he lands.
I learned that blood is not only thicker than water, but it is thicker than curdled milk, and you can't line up a mother against her own child even if he chased the cows until they got so wild they gave strawberry pop instead of milk. Any argument that goes contrary to human nature has struck a snag before it is started. A man must come into court with clean hands. I had started by rotting the other fellow's eggs and he finished by souring my milk. I wanted justice and I got it, but I didn't recognize it when it landed on me with all four feet. Chickens come home to roost, and my pigeons had found a nesting-place on my anatomy; and the spot they had chosen was right in the neck.