keep a contract for his
services after it became inconvenient to him.

There were bad sports among them, as among the rich and the classes
between. There were unions and individuals that were tyrants in power
and cry-babies in trouble. There was much cruelty, trickery, and
despotism inside the unions--ferocious jealousy of union against
union, and mutual destructiveness.

This was, of course, inevitable, and it only proved that lying,
cheating, and bullying were as natural to the so-called "laborer" as
to the so-called "capitalist." The folly is in making the familiar
distinction between them. Mamise saw that the majority of manual
laborers did not do a third of the work they might have done and she
knew that many of the capitalists did three times as much as they had
to.

It is the individual that tells the story, and Mamise, who had known
hard-working, firm-muscled men, and devoted mothers and pure daughters
among the rich, found them also among the poor, but intermingled here,
as above, with sots, degenerates, child-beaters, and wantons.

Mamise learned to admire and to be fond of many of the men and their
families. But she had adventures with blackguards, rakes, and brutes.
She was lovingly entreated by many a dear woman, but she was snubbed
and slandered by others who were as extravagant, indolent, and immoral
as the wives and daughters of the rich.

But all in all, the ship-builders loafed horribly in spite of the
poetic inspiration of their calling and the prestige of public
laudation; in spite of the appeals for hulls to carry food to the
starving and troops to the anxious battle-front of Europe. In spite
also of the highest wages ever paid to a craft, they kept their
efficiency at a lower point than lower paid workmen averaged in the
listless pre-war days. Yet there was no lack of outcry that the
workman was throttled and enslaved by the greed of capital. There was
no lack of outcry that profiteers were bleeding the nation to death
and making martyrs of the poor.

Most of the capitalists had been workmen themselves and had risen from
the lethargic mass by the simple expedient of using their brains for
schemes and making their muscles produce more than the average output.
The laborers who failed failed because when they got their eight-hour
day they did not turn their leisure to production. And some of them
dared to claim that the manual toilers alone produced the wealth and
should alone be permitted to