.

The next morning, getting up was like scourging a crowd of fagged-out
children to school. All her limbs and sundry muscles whose existence
she had never realized before were like separate children, each aching
and wailing: "I can't! I won't!"

But the lameness vanished when she was at work again, and her sinews
began to learn their various trades and to manage them automatically.
She grew strong and lusty, and her task grew easy. She began to
understand that while the employee has troubles enough and to spare,
he has none of the torments of leadership; he is not responsible for
the securing of contracts and materials, for borrowings of capital
from the banks, or for the weekly nightmare of meeting the pay-roll.
There are two hells in the cosmos of manufacture: the dark pit where
the laborer fights the tiny worms of expense and the dizzy crags where
the employer battles with the dragons of aggregates.

Mamise saw that most of the employees were employees because they
lacked the self-starter of ambition. They were lazy-minded, and even
their toiling bodies were lazy. For all their appearance of effort
they did not ordinarily attain an efficiency of thirty per cent. of
their capabilities. The turnover in employment was three times what it
should have been. Three hundred men were hired for every hundred
steadily at work, and the men at work did only a third of the work
they could have done. The total wastefulness of man rivaled the
ghastly wastefulness of nature with spawn and energy.

The poor toilers were more reckless, more shiftless, relatively more
dissipated, than the idle rich, for the rich ordinarily squandered
only the interest on their holdings, while the laborer wasted his
capital in neglecting to make full use of his muscle. The risks they
took with life and limb were amazing.

On Saturdays great numbers quit work and waited for their pay. On
Mondays the force was greatly reduced by absentees nursing the
hang-over from the Sunday drunk, and of those that came to work so
many were unfit that the Monday accident increase was proverbial.

The excuse of slavery or serfdom was no longer legitimate, though it
was loudly proclaimed by the agitators, the trade-union editors, and
the parlor reformers. For, say what they would, labor could resign or
strike at will; the laborer had his vote and his equality of
opportunity. He was free even from the ordinary obligations, for
nobody expected the workman to make or