the hours in which the world is working are numerous and always fascinating. it is not the night-time or the sabbath or the day of pleasure that counts, but the day’s work. whether it be as statesman or soldier, poet or laborer, the day’s work is the thing. and at the end of the day’s work, in its commoner forms at least, comes the signal of its accomplishment, the whistle, the bell, the fading light, the arresting face of the clock.
to me, personally, there is no hour which quite equals that which heralds the close of the day’s toil. i know, too, that others are important, the getting up and lying down of men, but this of ceasing after a day’s work, when we lay down the ax or the saw, or the pen or pencil, stay our machine, take off our apron and quit—that is wonderful. others may quit earlier. the lawyer and the merchant and the banker may cease their labors an hour earlier. the highly valued clerk or official is not opposed if he leaves at four-thirty or at five, and at five-thirty skilled labor generally may cease. but at six o’clock the rank and file are through, “the great unwashed,” as they have been derisively termed, the real laboring man and laboring woman. it is for them then that the six o’clock whistle blows; that the six o’clock bell strikes; it is for them that the evening lamps are lit in millions of homes; it is for them that the blue smoke of82 an evening fire curls upward at nightfall and that the street cars and vehicles of transfer run thick and black.
the streets are pouring with them at six o’clock. they are as a great tide in the gray and dark. they come bearing their baskets and buckets, their armfuls of garnered wood, their implements of labor and of accomplishment, and their faces streaked with the dirt of their toil. while you and i, my dear sir, have been sitting at our ease this last hour they have been working, and where we began at nine they began at seven. they have worked all day, not from seven-thirty until five-thirty or from nine until four, but from seven to six, and they are weary.
you can see it in their faces. some have a lean, pinched appearance as though they were but poorly nourished or greatly enervated. some have a furtive, hurried look, as though the problem of rent and food and clothing were inexplicable and they were thinking about it all the time. some are young yet and unscathed—the most are young (for the work of the world is done by the youth of the world)—and they do not see as yet to what their labor tends. nearly all are still lightened with a sense of opportunity; for what may the world not hold in store? are not its bells still tinkling, its lights twinkling? are not youth and health and love the solvents of all our woes?
six o’clock
these crowds when the whistles blow come as great movements of the sea come. if you stand in the highways of traffic they are at once full to overflowing. if you watch the entrance to great mills they pour forth a living stream, dark, energetic, undulant. to see them83 melting away into the highways and byways is like seeing a stream tumble and sparkle, like listening to the fading echoes of a great bell. they come, vivid, vibrant, like a deep, full-throated note. they go again as bell notes finally go.
if you stand at the entrance of one of our great industrial institutions you may see for yourself. its walls are like those of a prison, tall, dark, many-windowed; its sound like that of a vast current of water pouring over a precipice. inside a thousand or a hundred thousand shuttles may be crashing; i know not. patient figures are hurrying to and fro. you may see them through the brightly lighted windows of a winter’s night. suddenly the great whistle sounds somewhere in the thick of the city. then another and another. in a moment a score and a hundred siren voices are calling out the hour of cessation and the rush of the great world of machinery is stilling. the figures disappear from the machines. the tiny doors at the bottom of the walls open. out they come, hurrying, white-faced, black-shawled, the vast contingent of men and boys, girls and children; into the black night they hurry, the fresh winds sweeping about their insignificant figures. this is but one mill and all over the world as the planet rolls eastward these whistles are blowing, the factories are ceasing, the figures are pouring forth.
it is on such as these, o students of economics, that all our fine-spun fancies of life are based. it is on such as these that our statecraft is erected. kings sit in palaces, statesmen confer in noble halls, because of these and such as these. the science of government—it84 is because of these. the art of production—it is by and for these. the importance of distribution—it concerns these. all our carefully woven theories of morals, of health, of property—they have these for their being; without them they are not.
the world runs with a rushing tide of life these days. it has broken forth into a veritable storm of creation. men are born by the millions. they die in great masses silently. to-day they are here, to-morrow cut down and put away. but in these crowds of workers we see the flower of it all, the youth, the enthusiasm, the color. life is here at its highest, not death. there are no sick here: they have dropped out. there are no halt, or very few, no lame. all the weaklings have been cut down and there remains here, running in a hurrying, sparkling stream, the energy, the strength, the hope of the world. that they may not be too hardly used is obvious, for then life itself ceases; that they may not be too utterly brutalized is sure, for then life itself becomes too brutal for endurance. that they may only be driven in part is a material truism. they cannot be driven too far; they must be led in part. for that the maxim, “feed my sheep.”
but in the spectacle of living there is none other like this. it is all that life may ever be, energetic, hungry, eager. it is the hope of the world, and the yearning of the world concentrated. here are passion, desire, despair, running eagerly away. the great whistles of the world sound their presence nightly. the sinking of the sun marks their sure approach. it is six o’clock, and the work of the day is ended—for the night.
