The lean workman to whom I first spoke struck me especially by the strange weariness of his look.I asked him whether he had not been drinking to-day.
"I don't drink," answered he, in the decided way in which men who really do not drink always reply to that question.
"And I do not smoke," added he.
"Do the others drink?" asked I.
"Yes; it is brought here."
"The work is not light, and a drink always adds to one's strength," said the older workman.
This workman had been drinking that day, but it was not in the least noticeable.
After some more talk with the workmen I went to watch the work.
Passing long rows of all sorts of goods, I came to some workmen slowly pushing a loaded truck.I learned afterwards that the men have to shunt the trucks them-selves and to keep the platform dear of snow, without being paid for the work.It is so stated in the "Condi-tions of Pay." These workmen were just as tattered and emaciated as those with whom I had been talking.When they had moved the truck to its place I went up to them and asked when they had begun work, and when they had dined.
I was told that they had started work at seven o'dock, and had only just dined.The work had prevented their being let off sooner.
"And when do you get away?"
"As it happens; sometimes not till ten o'clock," replied the men, as if boasting of their endurance.Seeing my interest in their position, they surrounded me, and, prob-ably taking me for an inspector, several of them speaking at once, informed me of what was evidently their chief subject of complaint-namely, that the apartment in which they could sometimes warm themselves and snatch an hour's sleep between the day-work and the night-work was crowded.All of them expressed great dissatisfaction at this crowding.
"There may be one hundred men, and nowhere to lie down; even under the shelves it is crowded," said dis-satisfied voices."Have a look at it yourself.It is close here."The room was certainly not large enough.In the thirty-six-foot room about forty men might find place to lie down on the shelves.
Some of the men entered the room with me, and they vied with each other in complaining of the scantiness of the accommodation.
"Even under the shelves there is nowhere to lie down,"sald they.
These men, who in twenty degrees of frost, without overcoats, carry on their backs 240 pound loads during thirty-six hours; who dine and sup not when they need food, but when their overseer allows them to eat; living altogether in conditions far worse than those of dray-horses, it seemed strange that these people only com-plained of insufficient accommodation in the room where they warm themselves.But though this seemed to me strange at first, yet, entering further into their position, I understood what a feeling of torture these men, who never get enough sleep, and who are half-frozen, must experience when, instead of resting and being warmed, they have to creep on the dirty floor under the shelves, and there, in the stuffy and vitiated air, become still weaker and more broken down.
Only, perhaps, in that miserable hour of vain attempt to get rest and sleep do they painfully realise all the horror of their life-destroying thirty-seven-hour work, and that is why they are specially agitated by such an apparently insignificant circumstance as the overcrowding of their room.
Having watched several gangs at work, and having talked with some more of the men and heard the same story from them all, I drove home, having convinced myself that what my acquaintance had told me was true.
It was true that for money, only enough to subsist on, people considering themselves free men thought it neces-sary to give themselves up to work such as, in the days of serfdom, not one slave-owner, however cruel, would have sent his slaves to.Let alone slave-owners, not one cab-proprietor would send his horses to such work, for horses cost money, and it would be wasteful, by excessive, thirty-seven-hour work, to shorten the life of an animal of value.
The Slavery of Our Times -- Ch 2 -- Leo TolstoyFrom The Slavery of Our Times by Leo Tolstoy
