HOWEVER, I made a dead set at him, and before
the first third of the dinner was reached, I had
him happy again. It was easy to do — in a country
of ranks and castes. You see, in a country where
they have ranks and castes, a man isn’t ever a man,
he is only part of a man, he can’t ever get his full
growth. You prove your superiority over him in
station, or rank, or fortune, and that’s the end of it —
he knuckles down. You can’t insult him after that.
No, I don’t mean quite that; of course you CAN insult
him, I only mean it’s difficult; and so, unless you’ve
got a lot of useless time on your hands it doesn’t pay
to try. I had the smith’s reverence now, because I
was apparently immensely prosperous and rich; I
could have had his adoration if I had had some
little gimcrack title of nobility. And not only his, but
any commoner’s in the land, though he were the
mightiest production of all the ages, in intellect, worth,
and character, and I bankrupt in all three. This was
to remain so, as long as England should exist in the
earth. With the spirit of prophecy upon me, I could
look into the future and see her erect statues and
monuments to her unspeakable Georges and other
royal and noble clothes-horses, and leave unhonored
the creators of this world — after God — Gutenburg,
Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.

The king got his cargo aboard, and then, the talk
not turning upon battle, conquest, or iron-clad duel,
he dulled down to drowsiness and went off to take a
nap. Mrs. Marco cleared the table, placed the beer
keg handy, and went away to eat her dinner of leavings
in humble privacy, and the rest of us soon drifted into
matters near and dear to the hearts of our sort — business and wages, of course. At a first glance, things
appeared to be exceeding prosperous in this little
tributary kingdom — whose lord was King Bagdemagus
— as compared with the state of things in my own
region. They had the “protection” system in full
force here, whereas we were working along down
toward free-trade, by easy stages, and were now about
half way. Before long, Dowley and I were doing all
the talking, the others hungrily listening. Dowley
warmed to his work, snuffed an advantage in the air,
and began to put questions which he considered pretty
awkward ones for me, and they did have something of
that look:

“In your country, brother, what is the wage of a
master bailiff, master hind, carter, shepherd, swineherd?”

“Twenty-five milrays a day; that is to say, a quarter
of a cent.

The smith’s face beamed with joy. He said:

“With us they are allowed the double of it! And
what may a mechanic get — carpenter, dauber, mason,
painter, blacksmith, wheelwright, and the like?”

“On the average, fifty milrays; half a cent a day.”

“Ho-ho! With us they are allowed a hundred!
With us any good mechanic is allowed a cent a day!
I count out the tailor, but not the others — they are
all allowed a cent a day, and in driving times they get
more — yes, up to a hundred and ten and even fifteen
milrays a day. I’ve paid a hundred and fifteen myself, within the week. ‘Rah for protection — to Sheol
with free-trade!”

And his face shone upon the company like a sunburst. But I didn’t scare at all. I rigged up my
pile-driver, and allowed myself fifteen minutes to drive
him into the earth — drive him ALL in — drive him in
till not even the curve of his skull should show above
ground. Here is the way I started in on him. I asked:

“What do you pay a pound for salt?”

“A hundred milrays.”

“We pay forty. What do you pay for beef and
mutton — when you buy it?” That was a neat hit; it
made the color come.

“It varieth somewhat, but not much; one may say
75 milrays the pound.”

“WE pay 33. What do you pay for eggs?”

“Fifty milrays the dozen.”

“We pay 20. What do you pay for beer?”

“It costeth us 8 1/2 milrays the pint.”

“We get it for 4; 25 bottles for a cent. What do
you pay for wheat?”

“At the rate of 900 milrays the bushel.”

“We pay 400. What do you pay for a man’s towlinen suit?”

“Thirteen cents.”

“We pay 6. What do you pay for a stuff gown
for the wife of the laborer or the mechanic?”

“We pay 8.4.0.”

“Well, observe the difference: you pay eight cents
and four mills, we pay only four cents.” I prepared
now to sock it to him. l said: “Look here, dear
friend, WHAT’S BECOME OF YOUR HIGH WAGES YOU WERE
BRAGGING SO ABOUT A FEW MINUTES AGO?” — and I looked
around on the company with placid satisfaction, for I
had slipped up on him gradually and tied him hand
and foot, you see, without his ever noticing that he
was being tied at all. “What’s become of those noble
high wages of yours? — I seem to have knocked the
stuffing all out of them, it appears to me.”

But if you will believe me, he merely looked surprised, that is all! he didn’t grasp the situation at all,
didn’t know he had walked into a trap, didn’t discover
that he was IN a trap. I could have shot him, from
sheer vexation. With cloudy eye and a struggling intellect he fetched this out:

“Marry, I seem not to understand. It is PROVED
that our wages be double thine; how then may it be
that thou’st knocked therefrom the stuffing? — an
miscall not the wonderly word, this being the first time
under grace and providence of God it hath been
granted me to hear it.”

Well, I was stunned; partly with this unlooked-for
stupidity on his part, and partly because his fellows so
manifestly sided with him and were of his mind — if
you might call it mind. My position was simple
enough, plain enough; how could it ever be simplified
more? However, I must try:

“Why, look here, brother Dowley, don’t you see?
Your wages are merely higher than ours in NAME, not
in FACT.”

“Hear him! They are the DOUBLE — ye have confessed it yourself.”

“Yes-yes, I don’t deny that at all. But that’s got
nothing to do with it; the AMOUNT of the wages in
mere coins, with meaningless names attached to them
to know them by, has got nothing to do with it. The
thing is, how much can you BUY with your wages? —
that’s the idea. While it is true that with you a good
mechanic is allowed about three dollars and a half a year,
and with us only about a dollar and seventy-five –”

“There — ye’re confessing it again, ye’re confessing it again!”

“Confound it, I’ve never denied it, I tell you!
What I say is this. With us HALF a dollar buys more
than a DOLLAR buys with you — and THEREFORE it stands
to reason and the commonest kind of common-sense,
that our wages are HIGHER than yours.”

He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:

“Verily, I cannot make it out. Ye’ve just said ours
are the higher, and with the same breath ye take it
back.”

“Oh, great Scott, isn’t it possible to get such a
simple thing through your head? Now look here —
let me illustrate. We pay four cents for a woman’s
stuff gown, you pay 8.4.0, which is four mills more
than DOUBLE. What do you allow a laboring woman
who works on a farm?”

“Two mills a day.”

“Very good; we allow but half as much; we pay
her only a tenth of a cent a day; and –”

“Again ye’re conf –”

“Wait! Now, you see, the thing is very simple;
this time you’ll understand it. For instance, it takes
your woman 42 days to earn her gown, at 2 mills a
day — 7 weeks’ work; but ours earns hers in forty
days — two days SHORT of 7 weeks. Your woman has
a gown, and her whole seven weeks wages are gone;
ours has a gown, and two days’ wages left, to buy
something else with. There — NOW you understand
it!”

He looked — well, he merely looked dubious, it’s
the most I can say; so did the others. I waited — to
let the thing work. Dowley spoke at last — and betrayed the fact that he actually hadn’t gotten away
from his rooted and grounded superstitions yet. He
said, with a trifle of hesitancy:

“But — but — ye cannot fail to grant that two mills
a day is better than one.”

Shucks! Well, of course, I hated to give it up. So
I chanced another flyer:

“Let us suppose a case. Suppose one of your journeymen goes out and buys the following articles:

“1 pound of salt;
1 dozen eggs;
1 dozen pints of beer;
1 bushel of wheat;
1 tow-linen suit;
5 pounds of beef;
5 pounds of mutton.

“The lot will cost him 32 cents. It takes him 32
working days to earn the money — 5 weeks and 2
days. Let him come to us and work 32 days at HALF
the wages; he can buy all those things for a shade
under 14 1/2 cents; they will cost him a shade under 29
days’ work, and he will have about half a week’s
wages over. Carry it through the year; he would
save nearly a week’s wages every two months, YOUR
man nothing; thus saving five or six weeks’ wages in
a year, your man not a cent. NOW I reckon you
understand that ‘high wages’ and ‘low wages’ are
phrases that don’t mean anything in the world until
you find out which of them will BUY the most!”

It was a crusher.

But, alas! it didn’t crush. No, I had to give it up.
What those people valued was HIGH WAGES; it didn’t
seem to be a matter of any consequence to them
whether the high wages would buy anything or not.
They stood for “protection,” and swore by it, which
was reasonable enough, because interested parties had
gulled them into the notion that it was protection which
had created their high wages. I proved to them that
in a quarter of a century their wages had advanced but
30 per cent., while the cost of living had gone up 100;
and that with us, in a shorter time, wages had advanced 40 per cent. while the cost of living had gone
steadily down. But it didn’t do any good. Nothing
could unseat their strange beliefs.

Well, I was smarting under a sense of defeat. Undeserved defeat, but what of that? That didn’t soften
the smart any. And to think of the circumstances!
the first statesman of the age, the capablest man, the
best-informed man in the entire world, the loftiest uncrowned head that had moved through the clouds of
any political firmament for centuries, sitting here apparently defeated in argument by an ignorant country
blacksmith! And I could see that those others were
sorry for me — which made me blush till I could smell
my whiskers scorching. Put yourself in my place;
feel as mean as I did, as ashamed as I felt — wouldn’t
YOU have struck below the belt to get even? Yes, you
would; it is simply human nature. Well, that is what
I did. I am not trying to justify it; I’m only saying
that I was mad, and ANYBODY would have done it.

Well, when I make up my mind to hit a man, I
don’t plan out a love-tap; no, that isn’t my way; as
long as I’m going to hit him at all, I’m going to hit
him a lifter. And I don’t jump at him all of a sudden,
and risk making a blundering half-way business of it;
no, I get away off yonder to one side, and work up on
him gradually, so that he never suspects that I’m going
to hit him at all; and by and by, all in a flash, he’s
flat on his back, and he can’t tell for the life of him
how it all happened. That is the way I went for
brother Dowley. I started to talking lazy and comfortable, as if I was just talking to pass the time; and
the oldest man in the world couldn’t have taken the
bearings of my starting place and guessed where I was
going to fetch up:

“Boys, there’s a good many curious things about
law, and custom, and usage, and all that sort of thing,
when you come to look at it; yes, and about the drift
and progress of human opinion and movement, too.
There are written laws — they perish; but there are
also unwritten laws — THEY are eternal. Take the unwritten law of wages: it says they’ve got to advance,
little by little, straight through the centuries. And
notice how it works. We know what wages are now,
here and there and yonder; we strike an average, and say
that’s the wages of to-day. We know what the wages
were a hundred years ago, and what they were two
hundred years ago; that’s as far back as we can get,
but it suffices to give us the law of progress, the
measure and rate of the periodical augmentation; and
so, without a document to help us, we can come pretty
close to determining what the wages were three and
four and five hundred years ago. Good, so far. Do
we stop there? No. We stop looking backward; we
face around and apply the law to the future. My
friends, I can tell you what people’s wages are going
to be at any date in the future you want to know, for
hundreds and hundreds of years.”

“What, goodman, what!”

“Yes. In seven hundred years wages will have
risen to six times what they are now, here in your
region, and farm hands will be allowed 3 cents a day,
and mechanics 6.”

“I would’t I might die now and live then!” interrupted Smug, the wheelwright, with a fine avaricious
glow in his eye.

“And that isn’t all; they’ll get their board besides —
such as it is: it won’t bloat them. Two hundred and
fifty years later — pay attention now — a mechanic’s
wages will be — mind you, this is law, not guesswork;
a mechanic’s wages will then be TWENTY cents a day!”

There was a general gasp of awed astonishment,
Dickon the mason murmured, with raised eyes and
hands:

“More than three weeks’ pay for one day’s work!”

“Riches! — of a truth, yes, riches!” muttered
Marco, his breath coming quick and short, with excitement.

“Wages will keep on rising, little by little, little by
little, as steadily as a tree grows, and at the end of
three hundred and forty years more there’ll be at least
ONE country where the mechanic’s average wage will be
TWO HUNDRED cents a day!”

It knocked them absolutely dumb! Not a man of
them could get his breath for upwards of two minutes.
Then the coal-burner said prayerfully:

“Might I but live to see it!”

“It is the income of an earl!” said Smug.

“An earl, say ye?” said Dowley; “ye could say
more than that and speak no lie; there’s no earl in the
realm of Bagdemagus that hath an income like to
that. Income of an earl — mf! it’s the income of an
angel!”

“Now, then, that is what is going to happen as regards wages. In that remote day, that man will earn,
with ONE week’s work, that bill of goods which it takes
you upwards of FIFTY weeks to earn now. Some other
pretty surprising things are going to happen, too.
Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every
spring, what the particular wage of each kind of
mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?”

“Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all, the magistrate. Ye may say, in
general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes the wages.”

“Doesn’t ask any of those poor devils to HELP him
fix their wages for them, does he?”

“Hm! That WERE an idea! The master that’s to
pay him the money is the one that’s rightly concerned
in that matter, ye will notice ”

“Yes — but I thought the other man might have
some little trifle at stake in it, too; and even his wife
and children, poor creatures. The masters are these:
nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These
few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast
hive shall have who DO work. You see? They’re a
‘combine’ — a trade union, to coin a new phrase —
who band themselves together to force their lowly
brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen
hundred years hence — so says the unwritten law — the
‘combine’ will be the other way, and then how these
fine people’s posterity will fume and fret and grit their
teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions! Yes,
indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the
wages from now clear away down into the nineteenth
century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will
consider that a couple of thousand years or so is
enough of this one-sided sort of thing; and he will
rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself.
Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of wrong
and humiliation to settle.”

“Do ye believe — ”

“That he actually will help to fix his own wages?
Yes, indeed. And he will be strong and able, then.”

“Brave times, brave times, of a truth!” sneered
the prosperous smith.

“Oh, — and there’s another detail. In that day, a
master may hire a man for only just one day, or one
week, or one month at a time, if he wants to.”

“What?”

“It’s true. Moreover, a magistrate won’t be able
to force a man to work for a master a whole year on a
stretch whether the man wants to or not.”

“Will there be NO law or sense in that day?”

“Both of them, Dowley. In that day a man will
be his own property, not the property of magistrate
and master. And he can leave town whenever he
wants to, if the wages don’t suit him! — and they
can’t put him in the pillory for it.”

“Perdition catch such an age!” shouted Dowley,
in strong indignation. “An age of dogs, an age barren
of reverence for superiors and respect for authority!
The pillory –”

“Oh, wait, brother; say no good word for that institution. I think the pillory ought to be abolished.”

“A most strange idea. Why?”

“Well, I’ll tell you why. Is a man ever put in the
pillory for a capital crime?”

“No.”

“Is it right to condemn a man to a slight punishment for a small offense and then kill him?”

There was no answer. I had scored my first point!
For the first time, the smith wasn’t up and ready.
The company noticed it. Good effect.

“You don’t answer, brother. You were about to
glorify the pillory a while ago, and shed some pity on
a future age that isn’t going to use it. I think the
pillory ought to be abolished. What usually happens
when a poor fellow is put in the pillory for some little
offense that didn’t amount to anything in the world?
The mob try to have some fun with him, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“They begin by clodding him; and they laugh
themselves to pieces to see him try to dodge one clod
and get hit with another?”

“Yes.”

“Then they throw dead cats at him, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, suppose he has a few personal enemies
in that mob and here and there a man or a woman
with a secret grudge against him — and suppose
especially that he is unpopular in the community, for
his pride, or his prosperity, or one thing or another —
stones and bricks take the place of clods and cats
presently, don’t they?”

“There is no doubt of it.”

“As a rule he is crippled for life, isn’t he? — jaws
broken, teeth smashed out? — or legs mutilated, gangrened, presently cut off? — or an eye knocked out,
maybe both eyes?”

“It is true, God knoweth it.”

“And if he is unpopular he can depend on DYING,
right there in the stocks, can’t he?”

“He surely can! One may not deny it.”

“I take it none of YOU are unpopular — by reason
of pride or insolence, or conspicuous prosperity, or
any of those things that excite envy and malice among
the base scum of a village? YOU wouldn’t think it
much of a risk to take a chance in the stocks?”

Dowley winced, visibly. I judged he was hit. But
he didn’t betray it by any spoken word. As for the
others, they spoke out plainly, and with strong feeling.
They said they had seen enough of the stocks to know
what a man’s chance in them was, and they would
never consent to enter them if they could compromise
on a quick death by hanging.

“Well, to change the subject — for I think I’ve
established my point that the stocks ought to be abolished. I think some of our laws are pretty unfair.
For instance, if I do a thing which ought to deliver
me to the stocks, and you know I did it and yet keep
still and don’t report me, YOU will get the stocks if
anybody informs on you.”

“Ah, but that would serve you but right,” said
Dowley, “for you MUST inform. So saith the law.”

The others coincided.

“Well, all right, let it go, since you vote me down.
But there’s one thing which certainly isn’t fair. The
magistrate fixes a mechanic’s wage at 1 cent a day,
for instance. The law says that if any master shall
venture, even under utmost press of business, to pay
anything OVER that cent a day, even for a single day,
he shall be both fined and pilloried for it; and whoever knows he did it and doesn’t inform, they also shall
be fined and pilloried. Now it seems to me unfair,
Dowley, and a deadly peril to all of us, that because
you thoughtlessly confessed, a while ago, that within a
week you have paid a cent and fifteen mil –”

Oh, I tell YOU it was a smasher! You ought to have
seen them to go to pieces, the whole gang. I had just
slipped up on poor smiling and complacent Dowley so
nice and easy and softly, that he never suspected anything was going to happen till the blow came crashing
down and knocked him all to rags.

A fine effect. In fact, as fine as any I ever produced, with so little time to work it up in.

But I saw in a moment that I had overdone the
thing a little. I was expecting to scare them, but I
wasn’t expecting to scare them to death. They were
mighty near it, though. You see they had been a
whole lifetime learning to appreciate the pillory; and
to have that thing staring them in the face, and every
one of them distinctly at the mercy of me, a stranger,
if I chose to go and report — well, it was awful, and
they couldn’t seem to recover from the shock, they
couldn’t seem to pull themselves together. Pale,
shaky, dumb, pitiful? Why, they weren’t any better
than so many dead men. It was very uncomfortable.
Of course, I thought they would appeal to me to keep
mum, and then we would shake hands, and take a
drink all round, and laugh it off, and there an end.
But no; you see I was an unknown person, among a
cruelly oppressed and suspicious people, a people
always accustomed to having advantage taken of their
helplessness, and never expecting just or kind treatment from any but their own families and very closest
intimates. Appeal to ME to be gentle, to be fair, to
be generous? Of course, they wanted to, but they
couldn’t dare.